Archaeological Theory in Practice [2 ed.] 1138202711, 9781138202719

Citation preview

I have used a number of different books when teaching archaeological theory, and find my students learn the material better when I use Archaeological Theory in Practice. Urban and Schortman make theory accessible to students by demonstrating both how archaeologists may approach the same evidence from different theoretical perspectives, and how their own approaches evolved during their long-term research in the Naco Valley. Kristine Bovy, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Rhode Island

Archaeological Theory in Practice

Many students view archaeological theory as a subject distinct from field research. This division is reinforced by the way theory is taught, often in stand-alone courses that focus more on logic and reasoning than on the application of ideas to fieldwork. Divorcing thought from action does not convey how archaeologists go about understanding the past. This book bridges the gap between theory and practice by looking in detail at how the authors and their colleagues used theory to interpret what they found while ­conducting research in northwest Honduras. This is not a linear narrative. Rather, the book h ­ ighlights the open-ended nature of archaeological investigations in which ­theories guide ­research whose findings may challenge these initial interpretations and lead in unexpected ­d irections. Pursuing those novel investigations requires new theories that are themselves subject to refutation by newly gathered data. The central case study is the writers’ work in Honduras. The interrelations of fieldwork, data, theory, and ­interpretation are also illustrated with two long-running archaeological debates, the emergence of inequality in southern Mesopotamia and inferring the ancient meanings of Stonehenge. The book is of special interest to undergraduate Anthropology/Archaeology m ­ ajors and first- and second-year graduate students, along with anyone concerned with how ­a rchaeologists convert the static materials we find into dynamic histories of long-­vanished people. Pat first fell in love with Archaeology when neighbors gifted her a book about ­Mesopotamia. She went on to study Anthropology and Archaeology at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. She has been directing research in Honduras since 1975 where she has pursued her love of ancient ceramics, making maps, excavating, and theory dealing with structuration, inequality, the state, and craft production. Due to her parents’ move to Panama and her teaching responsibilities for more than three decades at Kenyon, she has also studied Mexican and Central American ethnography and history from the European arrival to the present day. Ed’s interest in Archaeology was sparked by his first dig in Winchester, England in 1970. Graduating with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, Ed has been directing with Pat Urban and other colleagues research in northwestern Honduras since 1983. Ed has taught Anthropology and Archaeology at Kenyon College since 1981 and continues to pursue research interests that include social network analyses, the roots of inequality, and interregional interaction.

Archaeological Theory in Practice

Second Edition

Patricia A. Urban and Edward Schortman

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Edward Schortman and Patricia Urban The right of Edward Schortman and Patricia Urban to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schortman, Edward M., author. | Urban, Patricia A. (Patricia Ann), 
1950– author.
 Title: Archaeological theory in practice / by Edward Schortman and Patricia 
Urban.
 Description: 2nd edition. | Routledge: London; New York, 2019. | Includes 
bibliographical references and index.
 Identifiers: LCCN 2018044611 | ISBN 9781138202719 (hardback) | ISBN 
9781138202801 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315473017 (ebook)
 Subjects: LCSH: Archaeology—Philosophy—Textbooks. | 
 Archaeology—Research—Case studies. | Archaeology— Fieldwork—Case 
studies. | Excavations (Archaeology)
 Classification: LCC CC72 .S36 2019 | DDC 930.1—dc23
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044611 ISBN: 978-1-138-20271-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-20280-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28914-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

For Wendy Ashmore, an excellent colleague, and an even better friend

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1 Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences Explanation 2 Common Sense and Worldviews 3 Good Sense and Theories 6 Theories in the Social Sciences 11 Summary 22 General Review 23

xiii xv 1

2 The Naco Valley and Us A Bit of Reflexivity 25 The Naco Valley’s Setting 29 Outline of Naco Valley and Mesoamerican Prehistory as Understood in 2018 32 Research and Theory in the Naco Valley 39

25

3 Culture History Scrambling to Fill the Chasm of Prehistory 41 Archaeology and Culture History 46 Summary of Culture Historical Premises 53 Culture History and the Naco Valley 53 Interpretations 68 The Naco Valley, AD 825—As We Saw it in the Early 1980s 71

41

x Contents

4 Processualism Processualism and Modernism 80 Methods Developed by Processualists 81 Summary of Processualist Principles 84 Naco Valley Research and the Processual Paradigm 84 Processualist Influences: 1975–1979 89 Kirk Anderson’s Geomorphological Study 90 John Douglass’s Hinterland Households 93 Looking Ahead 96 The Naco Valley in AD 825 as Seen Through a Processualist Lens 96

73

5 Marxism I: Trade and Power Marxian Premises 99 Marxian Methods 105 Returning to the Naco Valley in 1988: World Systems Theory 107 Setting to Work in 1988: Tying Up Loose Ends, Getting Entangled in New Threads 112

98

6 Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory Prestige Goods Theory 119 How PGT Related to What We Knew in 1988 121 Grappling with Crafts 123 Evaluating the Hypothesis, 1990–1991 128 Where We Stood in 1991 137 The Naco Valley, AD 825—as of the Early 1990s 138

119

7 Practicing Power Over Time Hypothesis Testing Continues 141 Crafting in the Hinterland 142 Change Over Time and a Return to Chronology 144 Changing Power Relations in the Naco Valley and Beyond 145 Practice Theory 160 The Naco Valley, AD 825—As Seen from 2018 168

141

8 Identity Humanism 174 Posthumanism, Transhumanism, and Antihumanism 175 Processualism and Postprocessualism 176

171

Contents  xi

Identity: Feminism and Ethnicity 177 Sex, Gender, and Archaeological Interpretation 178 Queer Theory 184 Groups and Identity 186 An Archaeological Example 189 Naco and Difference 190 9 Looking at Meaning: Semiotics Symbols 193 Saussure and Structuralism 195 Peircean Semiotics 200 An Archaeological Example 202 Naco and Semiotics 205

193

10 Phenomenology and Experience Edmund Husserl 209 Martin Heidegger 212 Maurice Merleau-Ponty 214 An Archaeological Example 217 The Naco Valley 219

209

11 New Materiality Philosophy and New Materiality 221 The Word “Material” 222 New Materiality Itself 223 An Archaeological Example 235 Naco Valley 236

221

12 Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia Southern Mesopotamia 239 Objects of Biblical Significance 242 Culture History and the Sumerians 243 Processualism and the Rise of the State 245 Cities, Storage, and Power 246 Processualism and the Expansion of Research Designs 247 Processualism and the State 250 Marxism and the State of Power 251 Seizing Power and Wealth with Class 252 Expanding the Analytical Scope: States, Colonies, and Inter-Regional Exploitation 253 Interpretivism: Fragmenting the State 256

239

xii Contents

Power and Gender 258 Communication Across Theoretical Schools 260 13 Multiple Views of Stonehenge Stonehenge Today 263 Antiquaries and Stonehenge 266 Addressing History in Context 271 Why was Stonehenge Built? 277 Creating Culture through Experiences of the Material 281 Continuing Contests for Stonehenge 287 Stonehenge and Identity 290

263

14 Conclusions 295 What Have We Learned about Naco Valley Prehistory? 296 What Does this Tell Us About the Nature of Archaeological Research? 297 A Few Final Words 306 Suggested Readings Glossary Index

309 345 359

Illustrations

Figures 2.1 Map of Southeast Mesoamerica showing sites mentioned in the text 28 2.2 Map of the Naco valley showing the distribution of sites, including political centers, dating to the Terminal Classic 30 2.3 Map of Site 123, Santo Domingo, Late Preclassic capital of the Naco valley 34 2.4 Map of La Sierra 36 2.5 Map of the La Sierra site core 37 3.1 Diagram illustrating the general temporal relations among the major intellectual movements discussed in the text 45 3.2 Rendering of an early section from the southwestern U.S. illustrating how architectural and cultural sequences are combined in this case to distinguish different archaeological phases 51 4.1 An example of how culture can be represented as a system of interrelated subsystems 75 5.1 Sample of coral and shell recovered at La Sierra in 1988 114 5.2 An example of the distinctive chert tools found in the shell-and-coral workshop 115 5.3 Polyhedral obsidian cores used in the manufacture of blades 115 5.4 Fragment of an elaborately decorated ceramic vessel made in the Naco Valley 116 5.5 Example from an imported polychrome ceramic vessel found in the Naco Valley 117 6.1 Examples of ceramic stamps likely used in cloth decoration 130 6.2 Example of a ceramic figurine 131 6.3 Example of a ceramic ocarina; the rear sounding chamber has broken off 132 6.4 Example of a mold used to make figurines 132 6.5 Plan drawing of the pottery kiln unearthed in northern La Sierra during 1990 134

xiv Illustrations

7.1 A sample of stone adze blades, or hachas 143 7.2 Examples of faced stone blocks reused in Terminal Classic constructions at La Sierra 146 7.3 Map of Site 128 151 7.4 Map of Site 175 152 7.5 Plan of the excavations at Site 175 153 7.6 Plan of excavations at Site 471 154 7.7 Plan of Structure 471–3, the oven found at Site 471 154 7.8 Photo of the basal steps that comprise part of the staircase that ascends the natural rise immediately northwest of the Terminal Classic pottery kiln in northern La Sierra 156 9.1 The three components of C.S. Peirce’s triadic concept of the sign are shown here, with alternate designations for each part 200 11.1 Hodder’s entanglement 230 11.2 Çatalhöyük plaster seen as assemblage(s) 232 12.1 Map of southern Mesopotamia showing sites mentioned in the text 240 12.2 General rendering of a ziggurat 241 12.3 Example of a map depicting settlement distributions 249 12.4 Design from a southern Mesopotamian cylinder seal showing the relation between subordinate men and women, on the one hand, and the food they produced and offered to higher powers, on the other 259 13.1 Map of southern Britain showing the location of Stonehenge 264 13.2 Map of Stonehenge showing the major features discussed in the text 265 13.3 Plans showing the different phases in Stonehenge’s construction 274 13.4 How views of a landscape can change with the erection of a ditch-and-bank construction or stone circle 283 13.5 Relations among different constructed and perceived features of Salisbury Plain’s landscape 286

Tables 1.1 Different levels of theory 7 2.1 Salient trends in the Naco valley’s culture history, from the first known occupation to the Spanish Conquest in AD 1532 33

Acknowledgments

We have been aided throughout our careers by more people than we can mention here. The late Robert Sharer, our mentor in graduate school and friend, helped us to chart our original path though we are sure he was somewhat surprised by the direction it took. Professional colleagues and friends, especially Wendy Ashmore, Janet Beatty, George Hasemann, Gloria Lara Pinto, Tom Patterson, Aeleka Schortman, Hayden Schortman, Joyce Marcus, and David and Becky Sedat, have cheerfully put up with our ramblings over the years, constructively criticizing and encouraging our ideas even if they did not always agree with them. We are also grateful to Jennifer Brown, Brigid Donahue, Kara Pellegrino, Katia Roque, Emily Smith, and Laura Yakas who provided insightful commentary on an earlier draft of this book. Mitch Allen demonstrated considerable patience in his several readings of this volume when it was first published at Left Coast Press, of which he was then the director. We are very grateful for his willingness to give the book a chance and for all the work he invested in helping us to hone our arguments and style of presentation. Routledge took on the book, which we very much appreciate; thanks to their staff for all their assistance. The Naco research discussed herein was generously supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Margaret Cullinan-Wray program of the American Anthropological Association, and Kenyon College. These funds made the investigations we conducted in the Naco valley possible; needless to say we are deeply indebted to the above institutions for their support. Directors and staff of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH), the Honduran government agency that oversees archaeological investigations in that country, were unstinting in their support of the Naco valley investigations. Those who have been particularly generous with their time include the IHAH’s directors Olga Hoya, Jose Maria Casco, Ricardo Agurcia, Adan Cueva, Margarita Duron, Victor Cruz, Vito Veliz, and Dario Euraque, as well as IHAH staff, including the late George Hasemann, Carmen Julia Fajardo, Eva ­Martinez, Alberto Duron, Carlos Acosta, and Isabel Perdomo.

xvi Acknowledgments

It was through the hard, conscientious work of the Naco Valley’s contemporary residents that the data discussed here came to light. We owe a great debt to all of our collaborators in the field, especially Luis Nolasco, Samuel Nolasco, Dagoberto Perez, members of the Posas family (Margarita, Edith, Elena, and Enrique), Jorge Bueso, and Rolando Rodriguez, with whom we have had the great good fortune to work for so many years. The Naco Project served, since 1988, as a context in which 114 undergraduate students from a variety of institutions learned the fundamentals of ­archaeological method and theory, as well as and 32 graduate students who pursued Master’s degrees and PhDs with us. In the course of working with such a uniformly bright and highly motivated group we learned a lot, those insights filtering into much of what is written here. Undergraduates are often not credited with the ability to conduct serious research. You will see throughout the book the significant contributions these young scholars made to unravelling Naco Valley prehistory; they participated in all aspects of the work. Our Laboratory Directors, Marne Ausec, Ellen Bell, and Sylvia Smith Dugan, kept them and us well-organized while managing the considerable influx of artifacts and the local staff who washed, counted, and labeled them, all the while analyzing a considerable number of artifacts themselves. We are grateful beyond words to all of those named above and to the many others who enriched our understanding of the Naco Valley’s past, archaeology in general, and teaching. Needless to say, any errors of logic and fact that appear in these pages are solely our responsibility. We have been aided throughout our careers by more people that we can mention here. We are deeply indebted to all those who contributed significantly to the Naco valley investigations: students and staff who helped direct that work; our Honduran colleagues who pursued these investigations with intelligence and vigor; the staff and leadership of the Instituto Hondureňo de Antropologia e Historia with whom we collaborated on the work; and, the agencies who funded the research, including the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Geographic Society, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright Association, Margaret-Cullinan Wray program of the American Anthropological Association, and Kenyon College. The last of these institutions also made possible our work with students in the field, something for which we are deeply grateful. In addition, Kenyon library and development staff have helped us immeasurably with funding the digitization and uploading of all field records from the Naco valley research (https://digital.kenyon.edu/honduras/). We are grateful to all who have worked on this project, especially Jenna Nolt and Sharon Slane Fair, the last of whom has supported our undergraduate and research programs in myriad ways. The late Robert Sharer, our mentor in graduate school, helped us to chart our original path though we are sure he was somewhat surprised by the

Acknowledgments  xvii

direction it took. Professional colleagues, friends, and family, especially Wendy Ashmore, Janet Beatty, George Hasemann, Gloria Lara Pinto, Tom Patterson, Aeleka Schortman, Hayden Schortman, Joyce Marcus, and David and Becky Sedat, have cheerfully put up with our ramblings over the years, constructively criticizing and encouraging our ideas even if they did not always agree with them. We are also grateful to Jennifer Brown, Brigid Donahue, Kara Pellegrino, Katia Roque, Emily Smith, and Laura Yakas who provided insightful commentary on an earlier draft of this book. Mitch Allen demonstrated considerable patience in his several readings of this volume when it was first published at Left Coast Press, of which he was then the director. We are very grateful for his willingness to give the book a chance and for all the work he invested in helping us to hone our arguments and style of presentation. We are also grateful to Taylor and Francis Press for taking on the book and extend our thanks to their staff for all their assistance. Needless to say, any errors of logic and fact that appear in these pages are solely our responsibility.

1 Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

It was March 5, 1988 and very hot. We were working on a drawing at the site of La Sierra in the Naco valley, northwestern Honduras. Things were not going well. We were trying to capture in 2-D, on graph paper, a complex set of 3-D relationships: the vertical connections among a sequence of walls, floors, and earth layers. This set of constructed and natural features resulted from the extensive remodeling of a rather large building that took place between AD 600–800. The structure was winning. In the midst of this ongoing battle with heat, humidity, and stratigraphy, one of our undergraduate colleagues burst through the brush and thrust forward several fragments of white material that had just been unearthed in the excavations he was directing nearby. “What is this stuff ?” he asked. Wiping sweat from our brows, and sunblock into our eyes, we were very surprised to find him holding fragments of conch shell. The most likely source of this material is the Caribbean, at least 35 km straight-line distance from La Sierra across rugged mountains. Nothing like this had ever been found in the Naco Valley before and, more to the point, we never expected to retrieve imported, exotic shells. The Naco Valley is, after all, an interior basin, not a coastal plain. After saying something useful like, “You found shells?” we struggled to make sense of the materials. What our colleague held—seashells—was clear enough, but what they meant was a mystery. Little did we think, as we stood there perspiring and furrowing our brows, that our whole view of Naco Valley prehistory was about to change. How could a handful of marine shells have such a major impact? And, even allowing for the adverse effects of heat on mental processes, why did two professional archaeologists have so much trouble grasping the significance of what they were seeing? Addressing these very reasonable questions and understanding our confusion requires braving the realm of ideas. We need to look at the preconceived notions that we carry into the field and use to make sense of what we find. By themselves, there was nothing particularly odd or outstanding about those bits of shell. Instead, their significance derived from their unanticipated presence at this particular place and dating to a specific

2  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

period in the past. The conjunction of objects, place, time, and our expectations concerning all three variables made them important. Trying to explain those shells would lead us in directions we had not anticipated going before that March morning.

Explanation This book is about how archaeologists write history as we explain what we find. What is an “explanation”? Explanation consists of a collection of statements intended to identify the causes and consequences of a set of observations. Explanations answer the question of why something happened as it is observed to have occurred. Explanations also generate new knowledge by drawing attention to connections among what might otherwise seem to be unrelated pieces of evidence. Inference to the Best Explanation Explanation is something we all engage in every day. We will argue that explanations in archaeology and in our daily encounters with reality take the form of inference to the best explanation, a kind of inductive reasoning. Inference to the best explanation describes an argument that accounts for a sample of observations by referring to premises that are plausible but not proven to be true. It also presupposes that these observations can be explained by multiple distinct propositions; among these it is possible to choose one as the most likely to be correct. The best explanation is the one that is most compelling as measured by its: • • • •

Generality, or ability to account for a greater quantity and diversity of the available evidence than its rivals while not being contradicted by any observations; Relative simplicity, that is, the argument that makes the fewest assumptions about the evidence at hand is the best, all else being equal; Refutability, the explanation is phrased in ways that it can be proven wrong; Expandability, the explanation has the capacity to account for evidence gathered after it has been proposed.

For example, you walk into your dorm room after a weekend away and find the floor strewn with pizza boxes, pizza crusts, and crushed beer cans. How do you explain this pattern of observations? Your roommate, Erin, argues that a group of strangers arrived, broke into the room while s/he was ­sleeping, tossed their trash all over the floor, and then fled. S/he is outraged by this disrespectful behavior and is distraught that s/he can’t identify the perpetrators or say where they came from or went. You, on the other hand, argue that Erin took advantage of your absence to hold a non-stop bacchanal which just

Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences  3

ended before your arrival. Both explanations account for the observed pattern of detritus but yours has the advantage of: • • •

Simplicity (it is far easier to assume that this is your roommate’s doing than the actions of some band of trash-laden peripatetic strangers); Refutability (it’s a relatively easy matter to check with your hall-mates to see if there had been a party in your room whereas your roomie’s argument cannot easily be disproven); Generality (if Erin has a history of weekend partying then your explanation is strengthened by accounting for yet another piece of evidence that the alternative leaves out).

Note that while your explanation is the better of the two on offer it has not been definitively established as true. It does not take long to come up with other explanations that could account for the pattern of debris that you ­observe. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that your inference is the most plausible of the set of possibilities and you have solid grounds for proceeding as though your explanation is true. There are other features of this form of explanation to bear in mind. First, it is ampliative. That is to say that the conclusions contain more ­information than their premises. You amplified your original observations to make a statement about Erin’s unfortunate weakness for partying. Strictly speaking, the mess you found did not logically require that your roommate was the culprit. Your interpretation was plausible, almost certainly correct, but went beyond the debris you found to infer the behaviors that caused that mess. Thus, your inference to the best explanation was ampliative in that it added information that made sense of, and went beyond, your original observations. Second, inferences to the best explanation are open-ended. That is, they can be refuted by the recovery of more information. You may, in a week or so, open the door to find, standing outside your room, a gaggle of trash-­ bearing miscreants preparing to dump their load of pizza and beer detritus all over your living quarters. At that point you will realize that Erin’s explanation, though not as simple or easily refutable as yours, actually accounts for this new piece of information better than your original inference. In other words, every inference to the best explanation, no matter how reasonable and certain it may seem at the moment, is always susceptible to being overturned as the result of acquiring new evidence.

Common Sense and Worldviews As widespread as reasoning by inference to the best explanation may be, there are significant differences in how this process of explaining observations is pursued in and outside systematic investigations of human behavior. This distinction relates to the difference between good and common sense.

4  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences BOX 1.1  Antonio Gramsci Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist who was born in 1891. He was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government from 1929–1935, dying two years after his release. He is one of the most influential thinkers within the broad Marxist tradition though he published relatively little during his short life. Most of his insights appeared posthumously when his Prison Notebooks, 3,000 or so pages that he wrote while he was incarcerated, were eventually published. One of Gramsci’s most significant contributions to Marxist thought was his notion that members of the dominant class in capitalist societies maintained power not through force alone. Rather, their preeminence depended in large part on their ability to impose their vision of the world and their elevated place in it through institutions they controlled. This elite hegemony inculcated in the majority principles of common sense by which they lived their lives. Common sense is a mode of reasoning that accepts as given and unquestionable the guiding premises of the dominant worldview. Gramsci contrasted common sense with good sense, a clear-eyed vision of the world that sees through the obfuscations of elite hegemonies to the ­relations of exploitation that consistently disempower and grind down the working classes. Gramsci thus envisioned power as arising as much from the control of ideas as from the exercise of military or economic c­ oercion. We have re-purposed Gramsci’s concepts to achieve other ends in this chapter. His ideas concerning ideology’s relation to the mode of production are however further developed in Chapters 5 and 6

Antonio Gramsci (see Box 1.1) originally made this distinction as part of his effort to reformulate certain aspects of Marxist theory. As you can see in Box 1.1, we have repurposed his terms to our own ends. Common sense refers to practical reasoning based on concepts and premises that are widely shared among members of a society. These foundational notions comprise a worldview that specifies the basic units of which r­ eality is composed and the processes of cause and effect that animate relations among these entities, producing reality as we know it. In decoding the shambles that was your room, for example, you had no trouble attributing significance to the various bits of debris you found there. You knew immediately what a pizza was, what its crust looks like, the kind of cardboard conveyance pizza commonly comes in, just as you knew what beer cans signify and how p­ eople interact with both in meaningful, if messy, ways. At the same time you could, without much reflection, draw cause-and-­effect connections between a party and its unfortunate consequences for your décor.

Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences  5

Your inference to the best explanation that Erin was responsible for your quarters being in such disarray was, therefore, based on well-understood categories of things and their relations with people that all who share your worldview would easily understand. Common sense and the worldviews on which they are based are essential to understanding reality and acting effectively within it. They serve as filters that allow us to interpret the complex sense impressions with which we are bombarded throughout our days. As such, worldviews help us to turn that confusing flux of stimuli into coherently structured information on the bases of which we can understand reality, our place in it, and take action. These filters are composed of ready-made categories in terms of which we can organize sense impressions and the established premises by which we can explain that organization. The resulting blueprints work to the extent that they simplify reality while still capturing enough of its salient features to serve as adequate guides for dealing successfully with that complexity. Worldviews are, therefore, models of reality that streamline its components and their relations into an intelligible form. Without them we would be paralyzed by trying to attend simultaneously to all the things we could perceive. These indispensable guides to thought and action are characterized by certain features that make them questionable means to acquiring verifiable knowledge. First, if anthropology has taught us one thing it is that other people living in other places and at other times understand the world in terms of very different categories and causal relations. There are many ways of describing the world and explaining what occurs within it and none has a monopoly on accuracy. Second, as worldviews are learned early in life, they tend to guide our perceptions and actions unconsciously. Third, these understandings often carry emotional weight as they are deeply associated with the intimate experiences among kith and kin in which that initial learning takes place. We are loathe, therefore, to challenge our deeply implicit worldviews or have them questioned by others. To accept that these models of reality are lacking in some way is to admit that the premises on which we base our lives are flawed. To the extent that these fundamental assumptions define who we are in relation to the world, such questioning poses profound existential dilemmas. We don’t know who we are. As such, worldviews are not just models of, but also models for, reality. They specify how the world should be, not just how it is, structured. This is a weak position from which to pursue new knowledge as these emotionally rich, unconsciously held conceptual models are resistant to ­being proved wrong. Their categories and assumptions define the ­basic ­parameters of our existence and so are not generally open to question. The only times these foundational premises are visible to us is during crises when it becomes increasingly obvious that their descriptions and expectations no longer match what is happening around us. For example, the arrival of European explorers during the fifteenth century in the Americas posed

6  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

significant challenges to the well-established worldviews of both the interlopers and indigenous populations. Pre-existing categories of people, plants, and animals were reformulated as were established notions of the historical relations among them. Common sense interpretations of the behaviors of people who live according to different worldviews are, therefore, prone to all sorts of error. This is because when we use the concepts and processes that make sense in our models of and for reality to understand others’ actions we generally end up projecting our understandings of the world onto them. For example, until recently ­ uman our worldview in the United States held that there were only two h genders and that they were biologically suited to different tasks. Women took care of raising children and pursuing domestic chores at home. Men were outward oriented, engaging in political and economic activities, such as cultivating distant fields and trading, that took them far from their domiciles. If we mistake this cultural construction of gender with human ­nature then we are prone to imposing our common sense understanding of gender on all past peoples. There is a lot wrong with such an approach. First, inferences to the best explanation based on common sense premises will be ampliative in misleading ways as the assumptions on which they are based have no firm rooting in reality. We will be prone to drawing incorrect inferences about female associations with cooking hearths and male links with hunting tools. These associations might make sense in our worldview but may well be completely out of place in the cultures in which the people we studied lived. Second, by imposing our understanding of the world on the past we deny archaeological data the capacity to surprise us. What we find cannot challenge our deep-seated assumptions about what’s natural if the evidence we collect conforms narrowly to our preconceived notions. Using common sense, we may still be able to choose the best explanation of an event from a group of interpretations using the criteria listed earlier. But all of those inferences will be deeply flawed by the unwarranted assumptions which provide the link between ­observations and interpretation. If we want to understand past cultures in their own terms, and to explain the actions of their members in ways that approximate the richness of their lived experiences, then we cannot simply use the precepts of our worldviews to understand their realities. To strip away these blinkers we need other ways of knowing. This is what archaeologists are trying to achieve through the use of theory.

Good Sense and Theories Seeing past our preconceptions involves a conscious effort to employ good, not common, sense. By good sense we mean that we must try to reason in ways that lead us to see the world as it really is and not how we think it should be. In the process, we replace worldviews with theories.

Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences  7

Before proceeding further, it may be helpful to distinguish different levels of theory (Table 1.1). Low-level theory refers to regularities based on direct observations (e.g., all kiwi birds are flightless). These are the patterns that you are trying to explain. High-level theory consists of precepts that explain a wide range of phenomena, including those patterns identified in low level theories (e.g., the synthetic theory of biological evolution can be used to account for the earthbound nature of kiwis). Middle-level theories explain relations among observed phenomena (low-level theories) using principles drawn from high-level theories. For example, the kiwis’ inability to get airborne might be accounted for by demonstrating how their flightlessness is an outcome of processes of adaptation by natural selection within the specific environmental conditions of New Zealand prior to the arrival of the ground-dwelling carnivores that people brought to the island. It is within the realm of middle-level theory that inferences to the best explanation are phrased, drawing on principles from high-level theories, and evaluated using the criteria cited earlier. Table 1.1 briefly summarizes the relations among the different levels of theory discussed in the text. Escaping the limits of worldviews and common sense requires self-­ consciously fashioning high-level theories that, like worldviews, help us to focus on some aspects of reality while winnowing out other possible observations. Like worldviews, high-level theories identify concepts and relations that allow us to describe events and specify why they occurred. Those explanatory mechanisms involve identifying relations of causation and dependence among variables that the theory singles out for particular attention. Unlike worldviews, theories require an explicit statement of variables and their relations along with repeated testing of inferences to the best explanation. Defining Variables, Testing Interpretations As an example of defining variables we might take Newton’s Second Law of Motion which proposes that force equals mass times acceleration (F = ma). Force, mass, and acceleration are key concepts, each of which is carefully and clearly defined within the theory. The equation F = ma, elegantly and clearly Table 1.1  D  ifferent levels of theory High-Level Theories

Middle-Level Theories

Low-Level Theories

Explanations of human behavior based on principles of broad application. Examples of high-level theories discussed in the book are culture history, processualism, and Marxian approaches.

Explanations of recurring Specification of regularly patterns noted in recurring relations archaeological remains by among variables reference to principles of observed in the human behavior derived field. These patterns from high-level theories. comprise the data that It is through middle-level are explained by hightheories that high-level level theories through theories are evaluated the application of against field observations. middle-level theories.

8  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

specifies how these variables are related. Using this theory you can describe and explain what you see happening around you (i.e., the rate at which objects fall in the earth’s atmosphere). Such an explicit statement of concepts and their relations makes for a far stronger description and explanation of events than do the unexamined, vaguely defined notions embedded in worldviews. Just as important to the strength of a theory is the requirement that its precepts must be tested. Ideally, expectations of what should happen under specified conditions if the theory is correct are matched against what actually occurs. This determines how well the theory predicts the course of observed events. Theories are rarely tested directly. Instead, their claims about causation are assessed by testing hypotheses derived from these broader conceptual structures. Hypotheses apply a theory to specific cases in ways that are testable and designed to make sense of what is observed. These falsifiable propositions fall within the domain of middle-level theories. As noted above, such formulations apply the abstract concepts of high-level theories to the observed regularities identified in low-level theories. Take for example the case of northern England’s peppered moths, Biston betularia sp. This nocturnal insect lives near Manchester, England. The observations (low-level theories) that the researchers set out to explain concerned changes in the moth’s color over time. Prior to industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century, most peppered moths were a light gray. About the middle of that century members of the species with genes coding for a black color increased rapidly in numbers, soon comprising about 90 percent of all peppered moths in the area. One hundred years later light gray members of the species were again on the rise, gradually replacing the darker colored variants. Explaining these shifts involved proposing a hypothesis (middle-level theory) that interpreted the documented color changes by reference to general evolutionary principles (high-level-theory). During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrialization in northern England produced tremendous quantities of soot that darkened the trunks of trees in the moth’s habitat. Those individuals whose genes created a dark gray hue blended in with this pollution-blighted environment. The darker moths lived longer and produced more offspring than did their peers with genes for the lighter color. Pale gray moths were easily spotted by predators and eaten early in their lives. As smokestack industries gradually disappeared from Manchester and its surroundings the environment changed. With less soot on the trees, now it was the dark gray moths that were easily seen and eaten, while their lighter colored fellows blended in far more effectively. This hypothesis was tentatively accepted following the precepts of inference to the best explanation. That is, it: accounted for the existing data better than any alternatives; was relatively simple; and could be refuted by future observations as environmental conditions in the area continued to change. In the process, the proposed hypothesis amplified the information beyond that included in the original observations in interesting and productive ways.

Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences  9

If a theory’s expectations are consistently met through the successful testing of its hypotheses, then a researcher can say that the theory is supported by available findings. Few would assert that the theory is fully established until many additional tests are completed. As noted earlier, there is always the possibility that new data will overturn a long-standing theory. Predictions that are not met in the observed data can indicate several things: a theory that is seriously in error; a misinterpretation of the theory in the hypothesis based on it; or a flawed experimental design. This is an approach to reality that stresses doubt and uncertainty, as opposed to the unquestioned acceptance of worldviews. There is, ideally at least, no room or excuse for becoming emotionally attached to your theory and the ideas that make it up. All is to be explicit, objective, and precise; nothing is to be accepted until it has been rigorously tested and retested. An approach to the world founded on doubt and uncertainty lacks the emotional appeal of worldviews that assure us of the built-in, possibly ­supernaturally inspired, rightness of our fundamental understandings and beliefs. Clear statements of basic principles and an insistence on evaluating our ideas against physical data do offer some advantages, however. Knowledge obtained in this manner is likely to be a more reliable foundation for understanding the operation of the world around us than that provided in world views. Further, scientific theories are not limited to describing and explaining events occurring within one particular area during a single moment in time. Instead, they are attempts to comprehend the operation of forces in a wide range of places and periods where similar conditions exist. Newton’s Second Law of Motion, for example, was not intended to explain rates of falling objects only in seventeenth-century England; it was meant to apply all over the world at all times. By questioning everything, researchers attempt to create a solid understanding of general, timeless processes, such as gravity. This knowledge, it is hoped, will become the basis for a better understanding of the world and for controlling some of its forces for human benefit; note that this process does not address the meaning of life the way worldviews do. Theories and Worldviews It is important to bear in mind several features of theories. First, they are the products of people working with ideas and assumptions that are available to them in specific places at particular moments in time. That is, like worldviews, theories are culturally constructed and historically contingent. Newton’s work cannot be fully understood outside of its historical context. Where theories differ from worldviews in this regard is that investigators actively and consciously try to make their theories applicable over a wide range of circumstances, thus going beyond the specific circumstances of their creation. Newton certainly worked within the culturally and historically contingent context of seventeenth-century England, but he sought to speak of processes that had existed throughout time and across the globe.

10  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

Second, theories and their associated hypotheses, like worldviews, constitute simplified models of reality. A theory describes or accounts, through its hypotheses, for a limited aspect of what happens in the world. Traditionally, theories derive strength from their concentration on the effects of a few variables operating under a limited set of specified conditions. The more factors involved, the more complex their relations are likely to be; therefore, the less clearly will we be able to discern the chain leading from a particular cause to a specific effect. For example, imagine that you are evaluating a theory about the factors affecting growth in bean plants. It would be much easier to test a hypothesis that temperature was the most important of these factors if you kept other variables, such as humidity, soil fertility, and duration of ­exposure to light, constant. Any differences among the plants at the end of the ­experiment would, therefore, have to result from the divergent temperature settings in which they developed (assuming that each specimen was genetically identical). A researcher who considered the impact of different temperatures, humidity levels, soil nutrients, and light exposures simultaneously on the development of bean plants would get results that are hard to interpret. Did Plant A grow faster and taller than Plant B because A germinated under warmer conditions than B; or was B’s development held back by getting too much water, growing in poor soil conditions, and/or its limited exposure to light? Answering that query would require conducting at least four additional experiments in each of which only one of the variables under study (heat, humidity, soil fertility, and light) was allowed to change while the rest were held constant. Theories, therefore, promote an understanding of events by providing a set of concepts and assumptions we can use to observe, describe, and explain those phenomena. Even more than worldviews, theories narrow our focus, encouraging recognition of some factors while disregarding others. Theories are, in this sense, like flashlights whose narrow beams clearly reveal certain aspects of reality but leave the rest in shadow. Without theories to direct our attention and filter out “non-essential” perceptions we would be overwhelmed by the abundance of possible observations that might be made. Like the unfortunate researcher attempting to grasp the factors controlling rates of bean growth, we could never be sure what variables had what consequences. Learning guided by theory, therefore, involves paying close attention to the operation of the relatively few factors and relations to which that theory draws attention. Perceptual screens are essential to any engagement with the world, to describing and explaining what we perceive. Theories and worldviews provide these screens but differ in their precision, general applicability, and testability. Summary Understanding what is going on around us depends on turning all that we can perceive into a manageable set of observations. Next, we explain those

Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences  11

observations by focusing on a few of the factors relating them. Deciding among those accounts usually takes the form of making inferences to the best explanation. Worldviews and theories both serve as means for converting stimuli into observations, the mysterious into that which is understood. In a real sense, worldviews and theories exist at two ends of a continuum. They are separated not by their ultimate goals but by the use of common sense in one and the attempt to employ good sense in the other. Common sense is based on unconscious, emotionally laden, hard-to-refute assumptions. Good sense, in turn, is founded on a self-conscious, dispassionate effort to transcend the limits of received worldviews by explicitly defining the variables of interest and rigorously testing causal relations among them. Never lose track, however, of something worldviews and scientific theories share: they are both simplifications of life’s remarkable complexity. Such simplification is essential to getting on with the business of perceiving, understanding, and acting. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that every description and explanation of any event, no matter what its source, is incomplete. While researchers are trained to be acutely aware of such restrictions in vision, most of us do not question our worldview’s completeness until we are forced to confront such gaps. These confrontations are rarely pleasant.

Theories in the Social Sciences The discussion thus far has skirted two important challenges social scientists in general, and archaeologists in particular, face in using theories as guides to research. These boil down to how variables are defined and hypotheses tested under non-laboratory situations. Our discussion leads to a consideration of why archaeologists cannot seem to agree on one overarching theory to guide our work. The answer lies, we argue, not only in difficulties experienced in evaluating any theory, but in the very nature of the phenomena we study, that is, human behavior in all its variety. Defining Variables, Testing Statements The twin problems of defining the variables we want to study and testing our interpretations of their relations affect all the social sciences. Consider, for example, the question of what factors contribute to an individual’s intelligence. We cannot directly see “intelligence” but have to assess this ­important, abstract capacity indirectly using a surrogate measure. This used to assume the form of scores on IQ tests. Are these measures accurate estimates of how bright someone is? What is really being measured in IQ tests? Is it the test-taker’s familiarity with standardized exams? Are there cultural assumptions built into the test that systematically favor those who grew up accepting those ideas? We are a long way from Sir Isaac Newton’s Second Law of Motion, so clearly expressed in Force = mass × acceleration, that

12  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

elegantly describes the variables at work on an object. We will travel quite a bit further from that model of theoretical elegance by the time we are done. Let us assume for the moment that IQ exams really do provide a reliable measure of the intelligence of each person who takes them. What factors possibly affect the outcomes of these tests? In other words, if intelligence as measured on IQ tests is a dependent variable (an entity whose value is caused by the actions of other forces) what are the independent variables that shape those test results? Among the possible candidates are: nutrition; family environment; inherited characteristics; health status; and socioeconomic class. Even if we successfully ignore the clear interrelations among some of these elements and treat each as a discrete variable, how would you define these factors and measure them? What does family environment mean? What elements are important in defining this variable? Would you check to see if both parents are present? Is it significant if other relatives also live with the family? What about relations among family members: are they hostile, friendly, neutral? Do you see the problem? To measure any one of these factors you would have to create an argument that links aspects of that variable to intelligence. Next you would have to come up with ways to measure those aspects which, often as not, can only be seen indirectly. Both of these steps are generally subsumed within middle-level theory as they involve linking the abstract concepts and relations of high-level theory (statements about what causes variations in intelligence) to patterns that are directly observed (differences in the IQ scores of individuals). In deciding among variables to study you will, therefore, be guided by high-level theory. High-level theory will also help you to define those elements that make up such variables as nutrition or socioeconomic class and guide you in developing measures for them. High-level theory, in short, is an integral part of your study from the beginning. Now, having settled on a variable and measured it, how will you test its importance in affecting the results of IQ tests? Say your hypothesis states that family environment plays the largest role in determining an individual’s intelligence. You could, we suppose, begin by whisking off sets of identical twin infants (thereby controlling for genetics), having members of each pair subjected to the same nutritional regime, given identical schooling, raised within the same social class, and monitored regularly for disease. A member of one set, however, would be raised in one type of family environment while the other would develop under contrasting familial circumstances (we are assuming, for simplicity’s sake, that there are only two relevant family settings). Intelligence tests would then be administered to the subjects on a regular basis throughout their lives and the scores compared. Any divergence in results would be due to variations in family environment. Clearly, such an experiment is morally appalling. No possible gain in knowledge could make up for the misery suffered by the children and their birth parents. There are serious reasons, however, for questioning whether such a study would even be feasible. Could you create identical educational

Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences  13

settings, ensure that each participant had the same health, and so on? If not, how could you be sure that any divergences in IQ scores within each pair of twins were due solely to family setting? And even if you could overcome these obstacles there would still be the nagging problem of what your IQ tests actually measured and how relevant your definitions of family environment were to questions of intelligence. Now consider the kinds of situations with which archaeologists deal. Take, for example, the hypothesis that the shift from hunting and gathering to the raising of plants and animals was caused by increased population pressure. That is, humans had grown in numbers to the point that foraging for food could no longer feed the population. Domestication—making choices that altered the genetic structures of plants and animals, and producing these altered plants and animals outside of their natural ranges—was a way of generating more food to support more people. This transition occurred at various points in prehistory, but always so far back in time as to be beyond our ability to see it directly and manipulate the relevant variables. As a result, archaeologists cannot measure their variables directly or evaluate their high-level theories by testing hypotheses under laboratory conditions. This is not to say that testing hypotheses and their underlying theories is impossible in archaeology. We can, and do, try and match our theories to data through hypotheses, a process we will see repeated numerous times in our discussion of the Naco Valley Archaeological Project. But how does such testing proceed if we cannot control the conditions under which comparisons of observations and theoretically generated expectations occur? Following from the premise that the hypothesis which accounts for the widest array of data is most likely to be true (based on the principles of inference to the best explanation) we would want to have as many different kinds of data against which to evaluate the strengths of different interpretations as possible. Pursuing this goal means following Alison Wylie’s (see Box 1.2) recommendation to employ multiple lines of evidence in assessing any hypothesis. Ideally, these BOX 1.2  Alison Wylie Alison Wylie, with her MA in archaeology and PhD in philosophy, is uniquely suited by background and interest to address questions of reasoning and explanation in archaeology. Her work in this field has focused on how archaeologists make claims about past social and cultural forms based on very fragmentary data that are only indirectly related to the behaviors we seek to reconstruct. Wylie has played a central role in discussing the place of analogic reasoning, the use of multiple lines of evidence, and the importance of background knowledge in formulating and evaluating statements about the human past.

14  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

lines of evidence should be independent of each other and based on established understandings about how the aspects of the world in question work. Independence is an especially important consideration. If two or more lines of evidence are independent, if the results from one are not conditioned by results produced by the other, then their combined support for a particular interpretation strengthens our confidence in the accuracy of the theory on which it is based. This sort of testing procedure is commonplace today in situations where forming conclusions about past events have very serious and immediate consequences. Forensic scientists, for example, use multiple lines of evidence, from fingerprints, to analyses of all manner of material traces such as blood spatter patterns and DNA, to infer how a crime was committed and by whom. In order for these data to stand up in a court of law the evidence not only has to be independent but the procedures for transforming bits of fiber and hair into meaningful information about the case must be based on widely accepted, well-understood principles. Amplification of information derived from multiple observations and based on established understandings of their relations is not an academic exercise in this case. Testing Hypotheses in Archaeology How are hypotheses evaluated in archaeology? Stop for a moment and think back to the argument about domestication’s causes. Again, keeping it simple, say we are trying to evaluate the hypothesis that rising population drove people to start planting crops and herding animals. Try to come up with the various lines of evidence you would need to tell whether expanding numbers of people led to experiments that converted wild plants to cultivated ones. As you proceed with this exercise list out what you would need to know to test this proposition and how you could recognize that evidence archaeologically. What you are engaged in here is operationalizing your hypothesis, that is, moving from the abstract realm of ideas to how those ideas might look in the real world of archaeological data. This crucial process is conducted in the realm of middle-level theory. As you go along ask yourself: 1) How independent is each line of evidence? 2) What assumptions do you have to make in order to measure such variables as population pressure archaeologically? 3) How much faith do you have in these different lines of evidence? One line of approach could involve examining the actual fragments of plants and animals recovered from excavations at sites in the area under study. These would likely be turned over to specialists in the analysis of floral and faunal remains who would use their expertise to distinguish domesticates from their wild forms. We would also give some of this material to labs where they could be assigned a temporal placement by such methods as Carbon14

Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences  15

dating, based on the regular decay of naturally occurring isotopes in organic samples. In both cases, the techniques used are well-established and their results are independent of each other and the hypothesis under study. Deciding that a particular seed is from a domesticated plant, say corn, is based on principles well rooted in biology. It has nothing to do with whether you believe in the population pressure argument. Similarly, the Carbon14 procedures used to date that piece of vegetation depend on established premises of physics. These are unrelated to both the question of the plant’s domesticated status and the issue of whether rising numbers of people drove the process of cultivation and herding. As a result, if these procedures confirm our expectations about relations among domestication, time, and population sizes we can justifiably argue that agreement among such different approaches is unlikely unless our hypothesis is correct. So much for the easy part. We still have to reconstruct population sizes at different points in an area’s history from the archaeological remains at our disposal. Here it gets trickier because now we have to specify relations between what we observe (archaeological remains) and what we want to know (population numbers) using principles that are poorly understood and upon which there is no general agreement. For example, we could use site size as a measure of population numbers: the bigger the site, the more people lived in it. This makes sense if you can fashion a convincing argument that there is a direct relationship between these variables. What, however, if large sites are occupied by relatively few people who like a lot of space between their residences, while smaller sites supported more individuals who were tightly packed together? Well, you could address that problem by excavating portions of the sites you found and determining how many residences there are at each. That is a good approach but how do you distinguish a place where people actually lived from structures that served as exclusively kitchens or storehouses? If non-residential buildings are used to calculate population sizes, you are going to over-estimate the number of people present at any point in time at any one site. So now you have to construct a set of arguments about ancient activity patterns that allow you to identify buildings used as residences and separate them from those that served other purposes. These arguments will be based on their own sets of assumptions about what the material remains of kitchens, warehouses, and sleeping or working spaces look like after they have been abandoned for several millennia. These arguments and assumptions are also probably going to be open to debate in ways that the principles and assumptions used in Carbon14 dating or the recognition of domesticates are not. This is because reconstructing ancient activities from material debris is an open-ended, uncertain affair. You are not done yet. Once you estimate how many residences were occupied at one site in one period, you have to convert that figure into the number of people who lived there. How many individuals inhabited each building defined as a “house”? Here you will need to construct a­ rguments linking the sizes and arrangements of living spaces to numbers of inhabitants.

16  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

This requires another, rather long, frequently debated, set of interrelated inferences and assumptions that tie residential space to population figures. Reasoning by Analogy In reconstructing the functions of ancient buildings and specifying ­populationto-residential area ratios you will probably rely on some kind of reasoning by analogy. This means that you will look at living populations, or those recorded in historic documents, and use their material and behavior patterns to infer what was going on in the past. You might review, for example, ethnographic (descriptions of cultural behaviors written by anthropologists) or historical accounts of residences occupied by people who lived similar lives under similar conditions to those of the social groups you are studying. If your reference population consists of the living descendants of the ancient people you are investigating, all the better. Such historical ties increase the probability that relations among material patterns and behaviors (such as building forms and their functions) are accurately perceived. In this case the ancient and modern people are participants within the same, but changing, cultural tradition. However the connections between the sources and subjects of analogies are established, it is common practice to reason from the present to the past, identifying ancient houses by comparing their sizes, forms, and associated artifacts with those recorded from more recent periods. We often use a similar train of reasoning to infer how many people lived in residences of different sizes, moving out from what we can document directly (ancient residential spaces) to what we cannot (population figures). These arguments by analogy are sometimes subsumed within middlerange theory. Middle-range theory refers to processes of reasoning and the procedures used to identify links between specific behaviors and their material outcomes. Middle-range theory can include: ethnographic analogy (searching the anthropological literature for discussions of specific actions and their distinctive material correlates); ethnoarchaeology (directly observing particular material patterns that result from documented behaviors performed by people in the course of their daily lives); and experimental archaeology (sometimes called “replication studies,” in these the researcher performs actions designed to reproduce patterns observed in the archaeological record). This reasoning from the present to the past can be included within middle-level theory in that it is a special means for bridging the gap between high-level theory and empirical observations. Middle-range theory, however, is not tightly tethered to specific high-level theories in that its explanations are not dependent on principles derived from those abstract formulations. Arguing that a particular configuration of bones, stone tools, and fire hearths is the result of (and explained by) meat processing at a particular place and point in time is based on a set of observations that are relatively free of assumptions specific to any high-level theory. Middle-range theory

Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences  17

may not be unique to archaeology, but it is highly developed here because it provides a crucial link between what we find (spatial relations among objects) and what all of us, regardless of our theoretical orientations, want to know (what human behaviors caused those material patterns). It is regularities in those behaviors that we ultimately want to explain through applications of high-level theory. Notice that arguments in middle-range theory take the form of inference to the best explanation. Here, again, you are drawing on disparate pieces of evidence (the distribution of material remains uncovered in the course of your work) trying to decide how best to interpret them based on the same principles of simplicity, the range of data accounted for, and refutability that we discussed earlier. In this case you are using analogy to amplify the information provided by the documented material patterns. In reasoning by analogy we are not looking for exact matches between present and past actions and their material markers. Instead, documented actions and their concrete results are used to narrow the range of ancient behaviors that might have been performed at a particular place and time. These sorts of arguments are crucial to producing an important line of evidence needed to evaluate, in our example, relations between population size and domestication. They are, however, advanced with a good deal less certainty than, say, claims based on faunal and floral analyses. You could easily find yourself in the position, therefore, of being able to say with some certainty when domestication began and what was cultivated in a given area. But you might not be able to establish to everyone’s satisfaction that population increases actually drove this momentous event. Because we do not directly witness the actions we want to study or the variables that affected them, archaeologists end up explaining what probably occurred by what likely happened. The results are almost invariably ambiguous (unclear) and contested (arguable, and argued about). No one should ever be convicted of a crime based on this sort of evidence. Evaluating hypotheses in archaeology is certainly difficult but it is essential to any investigation. Research must be structured, and hypothesis testing is one of the primary ways that archaeologists organize and direct our studies. We learn about the past by assessing the utility of a theory through testing hypotheses based on it following the precepts of inference to the best explanation. The very attempt to assign functions to buildings and numbers of people to residences, for example, leads us to explore such topics as how domestic spaces were organized and household life structured. Investigating such matters can illuminate aspects of ancient cultures that were previously unknown. Ultimately, it may be that we cannot say whether population numbers rose prior to domestication in a particular area and, if so, whether such growth alone caused people to cultivate plants or herd animals. By striving to evaluate this hypothesis using all the lines of evidence available to us, however, we will come to understand a great deal.

18  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

Co-Existing Theories in Archaeology Difficulties in deciding which hypothesis should be adopted are partly due to problems we experience in measuring variables (like population numbers) and testing expectations about their relations outside laboratory conditions. Consequently, multiple, plausible theories, and their hypotheses, designed to explain the same phenomenon often coexist. Unable to disprove one definitively and establish the truth of the other, there is no way to declare the absolute validity of a single perspective. Thomas Kuhn (see Box 1.3) forcefully argued this position in his discussion of paradigms within the sciences. Paradigms comprise the overarching concepts and assumptions that guide work within a specific scientific discipline, such as chemistry, along with the methods and criteria of evaluation employed in pursuing and assessing the results of these investigations. Kuhn noted that whereas each field in the physical sciences has its own distinctive and widely shared paradigm, social science disciplines are each characterized by a variety of competing paradigms. Difficulty in testing definitively specific highlevel theories through clearly stated and evaluated hypotheses is one cause of this difference between the physical and social sciences, like archaeology. There is another reason, however, for the persistence of competing theories in archaeology in particular and in the social sciences generally. Social scientists of all stripes study patterned human behaviors, what Emile Durkheim (see Box 1.4) called “social facts.” Social facts consist of actions that exhibit predictable forms that are shaped by shared cultural expectations. They may include the ways people attend religious celebrations, cooperate in preparing fields for planting, or party while their roommate is away. The problem for social scientists is that explaining these patterned and recurring actions requires taking account of a wide range of factors. Explanations of observed patterns in human behavior, in short, can rarely be reduced to cause-and-effect relations among a small range of variables. It is not the case that either genetics, nutrition,

BOX 1.3  Thomas Kuhn Thomas Kuhn received his PhD in physics but went on to make his most widely recognized contributions to knowledge as a historian and philosopher of science. In his best-known work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argued that knowledge about the physical world does not accumulate in a gradual and continuous process as a result of the rigorous application of scientific procedures. Instead, all research in the physical sciences, at least, is conducted within a sequence of temporally sequential, mutually incompatible paradigms. Paradigms consist of those bodies of theory, associated methods, and criteria for evaluating research results that all practitioners of a field (such as physics) share.

Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences  19 While pursuing investigations within such a shared paradigm scientists make great progress in answering open-ended questions posed by the generally accepted theory employing widely used methods and assessing the quality of their work against a set of universally acknowledged criteria. During these periods of ‘normal science’ observations that do not match the theory’s expectations gradually accumulate. Ignored at first, such anomalous findings eventually become so numerous that they have to be acknowledged. At this point the guiding paradigm is seen as deeply flawed and a period of ‘revolutionary science’ ensues during which a novel theoretical structure is formulated. Once established, this conceptual framework guides a new phase of normal science that will eventually generate the observations needed to overturn it. Some philosophers of science claim that Kuhn is refuting the objectivity of scientific knowledge. To them, since truths do not exist apart from the paradigms in which they are created, there is no basis for stating with certainty which understandings of the world are valid and which are wrong. Kuhn denies that this was the message he intended to convey.

BOX 1.4  Emile Durkheim Emile Durkheim rose to prominence in his native France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He went on to train most of the first French sociologists and to found courses of study in this discipline at some of the country’s most prestigious universities. Tragically, many of his students did not survive the First World War and he died in 1917 before the end of that conflagration. Durkheim is often identified as the ‘father of sociology’ not only because of his role as an educator but also for the part he played in establishing the study of society as a field distinct from other disciplines, especially psychology. There was, at the turn of the twentieth century, a strong tendency to see the actions of people in groups as shaped by the desires and goals of the individuals comprising those groups. Durkheim argued that recurring patterns of collective behaviors, what he called ‘social facts,’ were not reducible to individual dispositions but were governed by forces operating at the level of society. It was these forces that shaped individual beliefs and actions, not the other way around. Explaining why people behaved in certain ways when interacting with each other, therefore, required a science of society (sociology) distinct from a science of the individual

20  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences (psychology). The explanations Durkheim offered changed throughout his career. Initially he relied on functional accounts, explaining regularities in group behaviors by demonstrating their roles in promoting social cohesion. Later he broadened the scope of his inquiry, attending to the complex ways in which peoples’ understandings of themselves and the world around them were expressed in widely held symbols (‘­collective representations’) that were shaped by, and helped shape, the society in which they lived. The latter approach is most clearly ­expressed in his book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). Understanding social form and continuity thus, in Durkheim’s view, came to require describing interpersonal interactions, and grasping the ways in which these mundane dealings were imbued with emotional power through the manipulation of cultural symbols.

health, family structure, educational experience, or social class determines an individual’s intelligence score. All of them together, combined in complex ways, have some impact on that measure. Similarly, population pressure alone most likely did not motivate people to start domestication. This variable may have been part of a more extensive suite of forces that led to the observed outcome. Social scientists, therefore, are faced with a challenging puzzle. We must use theories to narrow our focus so we can successfully study the operation of a few factors and their effects. The very behaviors we examine, however, are the result of a wider range of forces than could be included in one theory. We are, therefore, faced with a conundrum: theories successfully advance research to the extent that they provide simplified views of reality, but do they simplify or distort reality? There is no easy answer to this query. Some would argue that particular theories can identify the most important variables and their relations that go into shaping the social facts being investigated. A researcher might claim, for example, that nutrition is the most significant of the many factors conditioning intelligence scores. Someone might say that population pressure is the crucial force behind domestication. Such assertions return us to the problem of deciding which claims are correct. Alternatively, we can acknowledge the complexity of human behavior, seeing different theories as complementary, non-competitive tools for describing and understanding ­human actions. Using theories, we can specify which aspects of that reality can be observed, described, and explained. In this view, the proliferation of theories in archaeology is not an unfortunate byproduct of problems encountered in defining variables and testing claims. Instead, it is an essential feature of any discipline whose members seek to understand human actions. No one theory provides a complete and adequate description or explanation of the processes being investigated. All research is inherently and inescapably incomplete. Every viable theory thus provides valuable insights from which we can all benefit.

Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences  21

Researchers, in this view, choose among established theories, or create new ones, as they address specific questions. Different theories, then, are variably useful in solving an assortment of problems. This is not surprising when you consider that people originally developed the concepts and relations making up any theory in an effort to answer a particular question that had not previously been considered significant. If, for example, everyone working on the issue of human intelligence followed a theory that stressed the causative importance of socioeconomic class, there would be a great many concepts and relations available that encouraged us to imagine how this variable affected the results of IQ tests. As valuable as such formulations might be in grasping a particular aspect of the problem, they would be virtually useless in addressing the question of how a person’s nutritional status influences their intelligence score. If you, as an innovative researcher, wanted to deal with nutrition’s impact, the first step would be to specify a new set of concepts and the relations among them that were appropriate to the task. Then you would make an argument for how you think they relate to intelligence. You would have to create a novel theory, in other words, to answer this question. Because human behavior is so complex, affected by so many variables, the questions we can advance about any important aspect of it, like intelligence, are numerous. Consequently, the number of social science theories designed to answer those questions will remain large, each one geared to investigating a significant but limited aspect of our field of study. Such diversity makes it especially important that, in trying to decide which among a variety of theories is better at accounting for a specific event, we should be sure that they are all trying to explain the same thing. For example, you may have been right in blaming your roommate for the debris he left strewn about your room. Someone else might intervene and say, “Hold on there, the real question isn’t who made the mess but why did he make it? To answer that we’ll have to look into Erin’s background and see if that detritus isn’t just a plaintive call for attention.” That second explanation is not really a challenge to your original argument. It asks another question that may complement and extend your hypothesis but does not contradict it. Similarly, someone could challenge your account of domestication based on population growth with another that claims people started to domesticate in order to draw a firmer line between culture and nature than was previously the case. By transforming our food into plants and animals that we shape and control, our ancestors were attempting to define themselves as entities apart from nature. It is tempting to see these two theories as being in conflict. Which one is it, domesticate to feed the body or the mind? In fact, it could be argued that these theories address two different questions, what did domestication accomplish economically as opposed to what it might have meant to the farmers and herders involved in the process. The evidence marshalled in each case will be different. Inference to the best explanation, therefore, operates with respect to certain foils. Foils are statements that contrast directly with the explanations being offered. The foil in the case of your destroyed room is that your roommate is blameless and someone else is responsible. In the case of domestication, the

22  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

foil is that population increase had nothing to do with the advent of farming and herding. Foils are critical in explanation. They are what your account has to dismiss. If you cannot disprove the foil then your explanation is weakened. In archaeology it can be very difficult to definitively vanquish a foil for all of the reasons given earlier. It is always important, however, to be aware of the foils with which your explanation is contending and to be sure that what appear to be conflicting interpretations really are addressing the same question.

Summary In general, therefore, researchers need intellectual tools that allow them to concentrate on certain aspects of what they study, to pinpoint variables of interest, specify their relations, and evaluate the validity of the supposed connections. Theories provide these conceptual structures. Social scientists, including archaeologists, deploy theories for many of the same reasons that their colleagues in the physical sciences, such as chemistry and biology, do. Social scientists, however, face much greater problems defining their variables and testing causal relations among them than do practitioners of the physical sciences. These difficulties result in large part from: 1) The complex interplay of factors that influence any variable we choose to study (such as IQ scores, or the domestication of plants and animals). 2) The need to measure many of these factors indirectly (such as family structure, or population size). 3) Our inability to isolate relations among variables in laboratory settings (although some kinds of laboratory work can shed light on aspects of both problem examples). As a consequence, archaeologists, like social scientists generally, draw on as many different independent lines of evidence as possible in evaluating hypotheses based on their theories and using the principles of inference to the best explanation to decide which account is most likely to be true. We try to be as explicit as possible in describing how variables and their relations are measured. Still, we are often left with inferences to the best explanation that are subject to revision. What constitutes a “best explanation” changes as new data become available and new theories are developed to account for those findings. Disproving theories by definitively refuting their associated hypotheses is, therefore, very difficult in archaeology. Researchers can easily, and in good faith, disagree about what recovered data mean and how this information relates to the question under consideration. Such uncertainty contributes to the elaboration of numerous theories in archaeology, each with its own set of ­adherents. Even if we could all agree on which hypotheses are right and which are wrong, however, there is reason to believe that our discipline

Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences  23

would still be home to multiple ways of viewing the past. The behaviors we study are products of complexly interconnected variables. Insofar as theory succeeds by focusing attention on specific aspects of reality, then no one theory could effectively take account of all the factors needed to describe and explain fully any situation. Theories, therefore, may well help us achieve insights concerning human behavior, but those insights are always partial, incomplete, and refutable. The more conceptual tools we use to study the past, the more interesting and useful vantage points we have for understanding what people were doing and why they were doing it. No one of them is completely right, neither is any utterly wrong.

General Review Where have we arrived after this brief review of observation, description, and explanation? At least we should be able to acknowledge that these processes that we take so much for granted in daily life are very complex. Further, living in a world that bombards us constantly with a wide array of sensory inputs would be impossible without filtering all that can be perceived into a manageable number of observations. The conceptual framework that screens inputs also organizes those observations into an intelligible, predictable structure. Worldviews serve this invaluable purpose for all of us. The unexamined nature of their rules and ideas and our willingness to accept their validity on faith make these pervasive models unsuitable, not for daily life, but for systematic studies of processes and relations that operate in various times and portions of the globe (and beyond, as in the case of astronomy). Doing systematic research requires substituting theories for worldviews. Theories perform many of the same services as their everyday cousins but provide a sounder foundation for knowledge. A theory is composed of concepts and principles that are clearly and openly stated and we are required to assess a theory’s validity by testing its hypotheses as we reason according to inferences to the best explanation. The last point means that theories must be repeatedly tested against data to see how well they describe and explain what really happens. Acceptance only comes after the evaluation process has been going on for a long time, assessing many hypotheses. Even so, questions about any theory’s validity should linger. Archaeological theories, like all conceptual schemes in the social sciences, are difficult to test in ways that yield results accepted by the majority of researchers in the field. This problem, coupled with the complexity of the phenomena we study (human behavior as it occurred in many times and places), contributes to a proliferation of theories each describing and explaining aspects of the material being examined. We can choose to bemoan such “conceptual anarchy.” Alternatively, and more productively, we can acknowledge that different theories provide complementary ways to study human behavior. Each theory is a tool suited to making sense of a specific aspect of a very complex reality. As with any implement, you choose one

24  Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

to perform a task for which it is appropriate. When excavating a burial, you would be well-advised to put away the shovel and get out the dental picks, spoons, and brushes. There is no point questioning the need for shovels or brushes; they each have their uses. Similarly, theories are developed as parts of efforts to answer particular sorts of questions. By their very nature, they can only direct our attention to limited aspects of reality. Consequently, when choosing theories, as in selecting tools, we must be aware of what purposes they serve and what their limits are. But we must still insist that theories be answerable to data. By using multiple lines of evidence we can gradually restrict the number of plausible interpretations of any past events. Some of the data we use to evaluate theories will be admirably reliable and independent of the theory being assessed (such as Carbon14 dating). Some, perhaps most, will be problematic in nature, their relevance and independence being uncertain and open to debate. The more lines of evidence that are brought to bear on a hypothesis derived from a theory, however, the easier it is to decide among conflicting interpretations employing the precepts of inference to the best explanation. Ironically, when we use all the evidence at our disposal to reject our guiding theory we will have the greatest confidence that we are doing our jobs right and gaining an ever more reliable understanding of the past. Each time we accomplish this feat we assert that, hard as it can be to interpret, archaeological data do effectively constrain our understanding of how our predecessors lived. That data can push back and challenge our understandings of past human populations. Our first exposure to archaeological theory in courses and texts is often organized around schools of thought. Schools of thought are broad conceptual structures that comprise more-or-less coherent approaches to understanding human behavior together with methods of data-gathering ­appropriate to these approaches. How do these schools relate to ways of reasoning we described as inferences to the best explanation? We said in that section that inferences to the best explanation are ampliative. That means that when reasoning according to inferences to the best explanation, you make statements that go beyond the patterns of things and actions you actually observe. Schools of thought provide researchers with the premises that allow us to extrapolate from what we find (patterns of material recovered during research) to what we want to talk about (what behaviors caused those patterns and why those actions occurred when and where they did). Without these bodies of theory we could not amplify our observations of objects to claims about human history. Researchers who subscribe to the same school of thought generally agree about the basic premises in terms of which the past is described and explained. At the same time, these investigators can disagree about how those ideas are to be applied in a particular case. Any one school gives rise to multiple high-level theories and to the many hypotheses that apply those theories to explaining specific cases. We turn in the following chapters to a consideration of the major schools of thought in archaeology and how they have been used to study the human past.

2 The Naco Valley and Us

No one embarks on a research project without cultural, theoretical, and personal predispositions. We do not begin investigations in places chosen at random, nor are our questions drawn out of thin air. Crucial decisions about what to ask, and where to ask it, are shaped by a wide array of factors not often discussed in research reports. In part, trying to separate the scholar as person from the scholar as investigator derives from the modernist notion that pursuing an objective study of any phenomenon depends on taking ourselves out of the picture. From that point of view, what we observe and how we interpret it ideally should be unaffected by who we are. It is true that we want to suspend as many of our more blatant biases as possible. Nevertheless, even the most self-aware researchers begin work with preconceived notions that, whether they plan it or not, lead them along certain research paths and away from others. This was definitely the case in our Naco Valley investigations. There is probably no end of personal details we could relate that would have some bearing on our research. These might include the initiative Pat showed in the fall of third grade to organize a group of friends into a hunting and gathering band roaming her neighborhood in search of edible plants (from frost-bitten gardens) and dangerous megafauna (local dogs who objected to our being in “their” backyards). This was inspired by the section on Neanderthals in a Time-Life book about ancient humans that her parents bought for her at a local grocery store. Let us just say that our interests in archaeology lie deep within our respective childhoods.

A Bit of Reflexivity One of the points we hope you’ll take from this book is that the background and interests of researchers do influence what we choose to do, and often how we choose to do it. So we think it’s important for readers to get a sense of who we are, and that’s what comes next. Neither of us entered college expecting to become archaeologists: Ed started out in history, and Pat was persuaded by her high school English teachers that she had a great career as a literary critic (they were so very

26  The Naco Valley and Us

wrong). Archaeology was something that drew us in the more courses we took in the field. At least as important as the classes was our participation in archaeological fieldwork during our undergraduate years. Pat attended a formal field school in Colorado, while Ed volunteered on several excavation projects in England, Delaware, and the Guatemalan highlands. You can learn a lot from good teachers and texts; in fact, we are counting on it. It is one thing, however, to be in love with the idea of archaeology. If we had a dollar or 10 from all the people who told us how much they just loved archaeology, we would have retired years ago. It is another thing to be crazy about practicing it. Archaeological fieldwork is like any job: it has its boring sides; and the places most of us work are often remote from such taken-for-granted services as drinking water (or running water at all), electricity, telephones, and the internet. Do you still feel that passion for studying the past you first sensed in a classroom when the temperature has just passed 100°F, the square you are digging has not yielded an artifact for three days, and something unspecified just took your lunch down its burrow and is not inclined to share? If the answer is “yes,” then your interest in archaeology runs deep. Choosing an area in which to work is often a very personal matter. Ed enjoyed the projects he was on in England and Delaware but fell in love with the field when working in Guatemala. Pat first experienced Latin America in Panama when visiting her parents who were living and working there. Deciding where to pursue research is based, in part, on the sorts of issues that can be studied in particular places. This was true in our cases, or became true with time and education. But a big part of Latin America’s appeal for us was the ­ uatemala vividness of the life we experienced there. Houses in ­Panama and G ­ ennsylvania steel and were painted in bright colors not seen in, say, Western P coal towns, buses rumbled by loaded with people and animals—chickens hanging from side-view mirrors—and everywhere we looked, life seemed to be infused with vitality. Being in Latin America felt right. Just as one theory is not necessarily the best in any absolute sense, so too there is no “best” place to do research. That locale is no more or less than where you feel most comfortable and excited to be, and whether or not the area has the potential to be intellectually challenging (in addition many times to being physically challenging). Both of us came out of our undergraduate field and classroom experiences with little doubt of the career we would choose and where we would pursue it. Consequently, we headed off to graduate school to gain the advanced training and degrees needed to make that plan a reality. Here we came to one of the major forks in the road to becoming a professional archaeologist. The graduate program in which you enroll plays a major part in introducing you to various ways of approaching the field. Schools usually provide distinct theoretical takes on anthropology in general, and archaeology in particular. This is not to say that everyone in a graduate program marches in intellectual lockstep. Still, faculty members tend to hire people with whom they feel some sense of commonality and shared theoretical orientations can contribute to

The Naco Valley and Us  27

that feeling. Who you study with, then, will influence the theoretical school in which you choose to begin your career. We ended up in 1974 at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) in Philadelphia. Penn had, and still has, an excellent, well-earned reputation for research on Mesoamerican prehistory, especially the Maya lowlands. Mesoamerica consists of central Mexico running south through Guatemala and Belize into Western Honduras and El Salvador. The Maya lowlands cover portions of Belize, Mexico, and Guatemala where some of the principal manifestations of prehistoric Maya culture are found. When we started graduate school, Penn had a strong tradition stressing intensive field training and an open approach to theory. To the extent that Penn professors expounded a single conceptual framework in 1974, it was that of culture history. Nonetheless, scholars there such as Robert Sharer were also exploring ways of synthesizing culture history and processual approaches to study the lowland Maya past. To be honest, our interest in theory was muted at this stage in our careers. We did not enter archaeology because we loved theory, but because solving the puzzle of ancient behaviors by studying patterns in material r­ emains was deeply fascinating. We were, however, aware of the conceptual currents flowing through the field at this time. Virtually every issue of such major archaeological journals as American Antiquity appeared with an article about processual archaeology. Many of these essays included programmatic statements, that is, sections telling us how the past should be studied, even if archaeologists were not yet carrying out these ideal plans. There was a palpable sense that a new paradigm was being worked out in ever greater detail. Publications and presentations by the architects of that framework, such as Lewis Binford, led to many heated discussions in which we participated. Another, quite personal, aspect of our upbringing influenced our interests. We were both raised as Catholics during a time when the Church was becoming a more open institution, one better attuned to the needs of its congregants. Many clergy, especially those in Latin America, turned to a social gospel that emphasized justice, mercy, and care for neighbors, and also ­questioned power hierarchies that created and maintained inequality. You will see later that questions of power, class, factionalism, and inequality loom large in our work. This stems, we believe, from our religious background; but the tendency was enhanced through teaching. In our first two decades at Kenyon we were asked to develop area courses on various aspects of Latin America. Some of the offerings were about women in social movements, indigenous people and the state, and indigenous people and globalization. To teach about contemporary people we had to immerse ourselves in ethnographic literature, supplemented by history and political science. All of our reading resonated with what we saw in Central America, particularly in the rural areas where we worked. Poverty and hunger were always present, but we watched misery increase. Our last spring in Guatemala was the first of the Guatemalan civil war—we did not go back to that country for a decade because of it. In sum, we came of age in a church redirecting itself towards the

28  The Naco Valley and Us

concerns of the poor. We saw those concerns daily when we lived in Central America; and we achieved an intellectual understanding of causes and effects through our teaching. All this can be seen in our research and writing. Selecting a Research Area As her graduate studies progressed Pat chose to pursue her dissertation r­ esearch in the Naco Valley in northwestern Honduras (Figure 2.1). As one of Pat’s ­dissertation committee members once asked her, “[expletive deleted], why work in that backwater? Do they even have architecture there?” This wellknown archaeologist was putting into admirably explicit terms what many others only implied: important investigations were to be done in the Maya lowlands, the core of the culture area, not on its margins. Pat came to work in the Naco Valley as the result of a happy accident. She had studied with John Henderson (see Box 2.1), a prominent Mesoamerican archaeologist, while still an undergraduate at Cornell University. John was, in 1974, at the point of initiating systematic archaeological research in the Naco Valley and generously invited Pat to direct the settlement survey. The timing could not have been better. Pat was in a position to begin her dissertation research and, while the Naco Valley was on the perceived fringes of the Maya culture area, it was close to that core. In addition, field-based dissertation topics were not that easy to find (for women—it was easier for men in those days). Ed was doing his PhD research in the nearby lower Motagua valley,

Figure 2.1  M  ap of Southeast Mesoamerica showing sites mentioned in the text.

The Naco Valley and Us  29 BOX 2.1  John Henderson John Henderson has had a long and distinguished career working in Mesoamerica. sAfter completing his dissertation research in Guerrero, Mexico, John initiated archaeological investigations in the Naco valley in 1974. He directed research there until 1977, moving at that point to pursue combined survey and excavation programs in the lower Ulua valley where he continues to work. Here he has collaborated with Dr. Rosemary Joyce and others in research devoted to describing and understanding the appearance of sociopolitical complexity in this massive coastal plain beginning around 1650 BC. John and his colleagues have also studied how these hierarchical systems changed up through to the Spanish ­Conquest. Branching out from investigations of political structures, John studied ancient social identities and the ways in which they were instantiated through various material forms. One of the pioneers in Southeast Mesoamerican research, John played an instrumental role in introducing a systematic approach to the study of a region which, until the late 1960s, had been largely ignored by scholars. We remain very grateful to John for first inviting Pat and then Ed to join his project in the Naco valley.

west of the Naco Valley over the mountains defining the border between Honduras and Guatemala. He, therefore, helped Pat conduct her settlement studies from 1977–1979 while she returned the favor, assisting him with the lower Motagua research in those same years. Neither of us had lusted after the Naco Valley as a research site. It had simply been presented as an opportunity that Pat happily snatched up. It was one of the best professional decisions either of us ever made. The value of that choice, however, was not immediately obvious in part because very little was known about the valley’s prehistory. Why that is the case is a matter of theory and is addressed in the next chapter.

The Naco Valley’s Setting The Naco Valley encompasses 100 km 2 of gently rolling terrain ringed by steep hills that rise 2,000 m or more from the valley floor (Figure 2.2). Cutting southwest to northeast through the basin, the Chamelecon river is the main source of water. This stream follows the line of a geological fault, ­d ividing the basin into two unequal segments: roughly two-thirds of the valley lies west of the stream, while the remainder is compressed between the Chamelecon and the eastern mountains. Despite its location in the tropics, the Naco Valley does not conform to the common image of a rainforest. First, the vegetation is tropical, but deciduous. Almost all of the trees lose

30  The Naco Valley and Us

Figure 2.2  M  ap of the Naco valley showing the distribution of sites, including political centers, dating to the Terminal Classic. As excavated Terminal Classic sites were generally also occupied in the Late Classic, this figure also illustrates the pattern of Late Classic settlement.

their leaves during the dry season, though many also flower then, making it look somewhat like spring. Second, the temperature is warm to hot yearround (averaging 27°C; 81°F); but, third, rain is not evenly distributed over all months. Most precipitation falls during May to November; the rest of the year is relatively dry. Still, timing and amounts of rain vary annually causing serious anxiety for people dependent on adequate moisture for their crops. This was the case through the 1980s when many of the basin’s residents still farmed. At that time, rain was a constant topic of conversation from planting to harvest. Concern over rainfall was certainly at least as important to the valley’s ancient inhabitants. Just as significant to farmers in any period is soil quality. The general impression of tropical soils is that they are difficult to farm because they are alternately leached of nutrients by rain and then baked by the sun. About

The Naco Valley and Us  31

5 percent of the Naco Valley is taken up by fields that match this expectation of low productivity. Most of the basin’s soils are of good quality, however. They are easily capable of supporting at least one crop per year of basic staples such as corn, beans, and squash. Roughly 5 percent of the valley’s soils are so fertile that two crops can be cultivated on them if there is sufficient rain just at the end of the dry season to carry the plants through to harvest. Many Naco Valley residents today can only look wistfully on the land, imagining how much it might yield. By 1975 a few landowners controlled the most fertile tracts. In the mid-to-late 1990s they were largely replaced by agrobusinesses, sometimes parts of multinational companies, raising cattle, plantains (cooking bananas), and sugar cane for export. Beginning in the mid-1990s, much land has been occupied by factories owned by foreign corporations. Going along with the factories are increasing numbers of housing developments for their employees. The few remaining small producers have to work on the poorest fields. Subsistence farming is fast disappearing, with wage labor, supplemented by gardens, limited areas for maize, and cultivating small amounts of cash crops (such as watermelons and pineapples), barely providing for most peoples’ basic needs. Widespread and dramatic modifications of the landscape due to centuries of farming and other modern changes have also eradicated most native ­species of plants and animals. Tapirs, deer, and jaguars once moved in the deciduous forest on the valley floor, and into the hills, which used to have many oak trees in addition to soft woods. Now there are large expanses of grassland deliberately created for the cattle, along with cultivated fields, factories, and housing developments. The hills have fewer trees every year, since many people who still have to cook with wood cut from these slopes. Instead of a mixture of trees, the hills mostly have pines rather than the oaks of yesteryears. The older people say even the rivers yield fewer fish, shellfish, snails, and crustaceans than they did several decades ago, statements we can support with our own observations. Now iguanas, a lizard valued as a source of food, are rarely seen, where before they were numerous and impressively large. These changes are the latest in a series of modifications brought about largely by human action on the Naco Valley over its three millennia of occupation. The basin’s population was never isolated from people in neighboring areas. The Chamelecon cuts a valley providing easy access to close-by areas: about 15 km to the northeast lies Honduras’s massive and fertile Caribbean coastal plain; to the southwest the major lowland Maya center of Copán is approximately 120 km distant. Paths run to the northwest and southwest over the mountains, leading eventually to Guatemala’s lower Motagua valley—­ another extensive Caribbean coastal plain—and Quirigua, a large lowland Maya site about 90 km to the west-southwest. Evidence recovered from ­archaeological excavations suggests that the basin’s residents maintained contact with members of societies living in these and other surrounding areas at various points in the valley’s occupation.

32  The Naco Valley and Us

Outline of Naco Valley and Mesoamerican Prehistory as Understood in 2018 Occupation of Mesoamerica dates back to before 10,000 BC when ­huntergatherers first moved into the area. Plant domestication began in a few ­ portions of highland Mesoamerica about 2–4,000 years later, agriculture becoming the economic foundation of societies stretching from central Mexico through Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and El Salvador by at least 2000 BC. The earliest evidence of habitation in the Naco Valley, however, dates to the Middle Preclassic, stretching from 1250–400 BC (the general trends in Naco Valley prehistory are summarized in Table 2.1). During this time, population was widely scattered around the valley; they hunted, fished, and farmed on a small scale. There were a few particularly influential ­social groups who occasionally commandeered the labor of their less well-­positioned brethren to build large earthen platforms atop which these elites lived. Some of their constructions reached 3 m high. Such power centers shifted periodically over the eight centuries of the Middle Preclassic, no one group sustaining its preeminence for more than a limited period. Despite their exalted living arrangements, these notables did not enjoy privileged access to foreign valuables, such as jade or marine shell jewelry. Everyone, regardless of the sizes of their residences, pretty much lived similar lives, using comparable artifacts. Differences between leaders and followers were muted and distinctions between the exalted and the common were not marked and were perhaps non-existent. These social developments are fairly modest when compared with the emergence at this time of populous societies dominated by powerful rulers in such places as the Gulf Coast of Mexico and the lowland forests of Guatemala. In fact, population was growing throughout Mesoamerica during the Middle Preclassic and expressions of political hierarchies, including the construction of large buildings, were becoming increasingly widespread. The succeeding Late Preclassic (400 BC–AD 200) in the Naco Valley may have witnessed a population decline. Fewer sites dating to this interval are known than for just about any other period in the valley’s prehistory. Interestingly, a major political center, Santo Domingo (Site 123), was built now (Figure 2.3). Its 23 massive, stone-faced platforms are nestled against the foothills on the basin’s far northwest margin. Some people in the valley, therefore, were able to command the labor to erect the densest concentration of large buildings the valley had seen up to this point. How they managed this feat, and why a seemingly dwindling local population acceded to their demands, remain unknown. This period was marked by considerable social and political change throughout Mesoamerica. While some areas suffered demographic losses similar to those apparently faced in the Naco Valley, others witnessed dramatic shifts in the opposite direction. The region’s first clearly defined states (politically centralized, hierarchically structured realms) emerged now in the

Table 2.1  Salient trends in the Naco valley’s culture history, from the first known occupation to the Spanish Conquest in AD 1532 Period

Dates

Sociopolitical Organization

Population Levels

Intensity of External Contacts

Middle Preclassic

1250–400 BC

Political fragmentation, minimal development of hierarchy.

Widely dispersed, fairly low.

Evidence for the spread of ideas, but not goods, from neighboring areas. Signs of intersocietal exchange remain weak.

Late Preclassic

400 BC–AD Political 200 centralization at one major valley capital; evidence for hierarchy is unclear. Early Classic AD Political 200–600 fragmentation among at least three competing polities; hierarchy is not strongly developed. Late Classic AD Power is highly 600–800 centralized at La Sierra; evidence for a valley-wide hierarchy is strong. Terminal AD Power is divided Classic 800–1000 among as many as 13 political centers; heterarchy replaces the valleywide hierarchy. Early AD The power Postclassic 1000–1300 commanded by surviving elites was minimal and fragmented; hierarchy is barely recognizable.

May mark a period of significant population decline. Population increases considerably across the valley.

There remains relatively little evidence of inter-societal exchange.

Population continues to rise, filling all parts of the basin. Population increases throughout the valley.

The intensity of inter-societal transactions increases significantly. Inter-societal exchanges continue at relatively high levels.

Population Evidence for drops inter-societal precipitously exchanges is and is minimal. concentrated in the central and northern valley. Late AD Power was Population rises Ethnohistoric Postclassic 1300–1532 increasingly vested markedly but accounts indicate in the rulers of is still largely an increase in two valley centers; found in the inter-societal signs of hierarchy central and exchanges; increase. northern material remains valley. confirm this view to some extent.

34  The Naco Valley and Us

Figure 2.3  M  ap of Site 123, Santo Domingo, Late Preclassic capital of the Naco valley.

highland valleys of Oaxaca and Mexico. Each was commanded from large capitals, Monte Alban in Oaxaca and Teotihuacan in the valley of Mexico, whose influence extended well beyond their immediate hinterlands. Closer to the Naco Valley, such lowland Maya sites as El Mirador, Tikal, and C ­ alakmul to the northwest were also taking on the trappings of major political, population, and economic centers. The apparent centralization of control over the Naco Valley represented by Santo Domingo was shattered during the Early Classic (AD 200–600). Leaders of at least three political units divided the basin among themselves at

The Naco Valley and Us  35

this time, each ruling from a small capital with no more than 28 structures apiece. Within each of the three centers were several monumental platforms (defined in our area as structures 1.5 m or more high). Population, based on the number of sites with evidence of Early Classic settlement, was rising. This political decentralization contrasts with the continued growth of the major Mesoamerican realms focused on Monte Alban, Teotihuacan, Tikal, Calakmul, and other comparable capitals. That Tikal’s rulers were, by the late fourth century, descended from interlopers from Teotihuacan highlights the political dynamism of the Early Classic and the close ties that linked at least members of the period’s principal royal houses across Mesoamerica. The founding scion of the Copán dynasty was another of these peripatetic elites, this time arriving in what is now western Honduras from the Maya lowlands. That ruler, Yax K’uk’ Mo,’ ensconced himself, possibly through force of arms, in the Copán valley about 120 km southwest of the Naco Valley in the fifth century AD. There is very little evidence of any connections between the Naco and Copán valleys at this point. There are, in fact, no clear signs that the former basin’s residents were deeply involved with the tumultuous history that was unfolding within the Maya lowlands generally. A major shift occurred during the Late Classic (AD 600–800). The leaders of one of the Early Classic centers, La Sierra, won out against their competitors and established control over the entire valley (Figure 2.4). The new capital, with 468 surface-visible constructions, is fully ten times the size of its next largest contemporary. La Sierra’s site core, comprised of 21 massive platforms organized around two concentrically arranged plazas, also provides the most significant evidence of labor control seen anywhere in the Late Classic basin (Figure 2.5). La Sierra’s elite enjoyed a locally unprecedented ability to attract subordinates to their center. Roughly one-third of all known Late Classic structures are found in La Sierra and within a 1 km radius of the capital. No matter how this aggregation was achieved, by force, positive incentives, or both, it is a testament to the power of these newly established lords. Throughout the Late Classic, population in the Naco Valley was rising; almost every environment was occupied, and the number of sites proliferated rapidly. Most of these settlements take the form of four to 12 low platforms with stone facings that supported houses, kitchens, and storage facilities made of perishable materials on their earthen-floored summits. These constructions are almost invariably organized around a patio which likely served as a place for casual interactions as well as for performing such domestic tasks as food preparation and consumption. Such patio-focused structure groups are often called households in Mesoamerica. Households were the basic social and economic units in ancient Mesoamerican societies. However household membership was defined, it was within domestic groups that people pooled their labor to meet their basic needs. Households of this form proliferated throughout the Naco Valley during the Late Classic, being found within La Sierra and across the basin.

36  The Naco Valley and Us

Figure 2.4  Map of La Sierra.

The ascendancy of La Sierra’s elites occurred at a time of great political turmoil in Mesoamerica. Teotihuacan and Monte Alban were in decline while the nearby lowland Maya centers were embroiled in an escalating series of inter-polity wars. The primary players in these latter conflicts were the rulers of Tikal and Calakmul who sought regional supremacy through direct attacks on each other and their respective allies. Copán’s lords, long supporters of Tikal, were adversely affected by these events. Copán’s ruler, Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil, was captured and sacrificed in AD 738 by his relative and former ally, K’ak’ Tiliw’ Chan Yo’at, the leader of nearby Quirigua and a new

Figure 2.5  Map of the La Sierra site core. The structures shaded in gray were built in the Terminal Classic while those shown in white date to the Late Classic.

38  The Naco Valley and Us

ally of Calakmul. The abandonment of La Sierra’s Late Classic site core, most likely in the early ninth century, may have been related to these upheavals. The power of La Sierra’s magnates waned during the Terminal Classic (AD 800–1000). Though some of the major buildings in the site core were abandoned, the majority of residences used by commoners were still occupied. Households were still found throughout the basin and population numbers for the valley as a whole continued to increase, though more slowly than during the Late Classic. La Sierra seems to have remained a major political center, a new site core being raised now immediately to the east of its Late Classic predecessor (Figure 2.5). Nonetheless, its rulers increasingly shared the stage with other contenders. At least 12 new seats of political power appear now, each with its own core of monumental buildings and cadre of supporters. Though La Sierra’s rulers may have still had an edge in these political contests, it is hard to escape the impression that power was slipping from their grasp, diffusing out to upstarts. Comparable processes of political decentralization are evident in many portions of Mesoamerica at this time, and are especially marked in the southern Maya lowlands. Copán’s royal dynasty had seemingly fallen from power early in the ninth century, whereas the monarchs of Tikal, Calakmul, and most of their former allies had ceased to rule by the tenth century. Carved monuments that had previously celebrated these divine leaders were no longer being raised, rulers no longer commissioned major building projects, and the populations they formerly commanded declined sharply in numbers. Developments in the Naco Valley, therefore, seem to represent a specific example of broader political, economic, and demographic trends. Interestingly, at least some Maya capitals in northern Yucatan thrived during this interval. One of them, Chichen Itza, even emerged as a major political and economic center whose influence, as seen in its art and iconography, spread widely throughout Mesoamerica. Processes of political fragmentation in the Naco Valley continued unabated through the Early Postclassic (AD 1000–1300) when La Sierra was largely abandoned. Population numbers, which had been on a more-or-less continuous ascent for roughly six centuries, now went into a steep decline. Most people were concentrated in the central and northern parts of the valley during the Early Postclassic, abandoning some of the most fertile soils across the southern third of the basin. The former pattern of household constructions organized around a central patio was replaced with a more dispersed arrangement of buildings without an obvious spatial focus. Households may well have persisted as basic units of social organization. Based on changes in their material forms, however, they might now have been organized differently. Signs of political power in the valley are few. There were only two minuscule centers each with 16–19 structures, none of which was taller than 2.75 m. The ability to command the labor needed for large-scale projects had definitely ebbed. Similar developments are also noted throughout the Maya lowlands at this time. Even the realms in northern Yucatan declined in population and political importance at this time.

The Naco Valley and Us  39

The Late Postclassic (AD 1300–1532 and the Spanish Conquest in our area) sees the rapid rise of the site of Naco to both local and regional prominence. Covering roughly 1 km 2, Naco was one of the largest valley centers ever built and a center of long-distance trade. A second center, Viejo Brisas del Valle (Site PVN 306), lies a scant 2 km northeast of the Naco Valley on the north bank of the Chamelecon River. This large site, with an estimated 120 structures and 223 artifact scatters covering 0.5 km 2, may have been one of Naco’s major competitors. Alternatively, Naco and Brisas might have been part of the same extensive site that the Spanish called ‘Naco.’ Late Postclassic rural settlements are difficult to identify on survey, in part because most buildings raised during this period were made of perishable materials that leave little trace. Any mounds built now were made of earth, but most buildings were constructed on the ground surface. Any signs of nucleated patio-focused domestic groups had disappeared. As hard as it is to find Late Postclassic rural sites, the large sizes of Naco and Brisas, coupled with early Spanish accounts of 10,000 people living in Naco by the early sixteenth century, suggest that population numbers were definitely rebounding. It was, of course, at this point that the indigenous history of the valley came to an end. Fought over by rival Spanish factions, mercilessly raided for slaves, and overwhelmed by diseases brought from the Old World, native populations and cultures in the basin quickly declined and eventually disappeared. This tragic situation was repeated frequently throughout Central America. The Late Postclassic sees a resurgence of powerful, often expansionistic, states throughout Mesoamerica. The Mexica (Aztecs) and their perpetual ­r ivals, the Tarascans, established their empires during the final pre-­Columbian centuries in central and western Mexico. Closer to the Naco Valley, Mayapan was, until the mid-fifteenth century, the capital of a realm that encompassed most of northern Yucatan. Even though the Late Postclassic was marked by another round of increasingly intense armed conflicts, it also seems to have been characterized by growth in long-distance commerce, population numbers, and the development of novel political forms. This resurgence was tragically curtailed everywhere by the Spanish Conquest and its legacy of disease.

Research and Theory in the Naco Valley We concentrate in the upcoming chapters on our research into developments dating to the Late and Terminal Classic periods (originally combined within the “Late Classic” phase, dated to AD 600–900). The large quantities of material relevant to this interval that we have analyzed provide ample scope for examining how theories guide research, are then evaluated, and subsequently change. Other phases in the basin’s long prehistory are given short shrift in this review because we feel that a relatively tight temporal focus is needed to highlight our central theme of relations among theory, field investigations, and data.

40  The Naco Valley and Us

Chapters 3–11 each focuses on a specific school of thought or set of closely related approaches to archaeological theory (culture history, processualism, Marxian theory, and interpretivism). After outlining the basic premises of each perspective we will discuss how we employed these conceptual frameworks to guide our field research in the Naco Valley. In general, the order in which the theories are presented is chronological. Culture history, the oldest of the distinct schools of thought in archaeology, is succeeded by processualism which was developed largely in opposition to its predecessor. Marxian approaches come next, to be succeeded by a sample of interpretivist viewpoints which were promoted in many cases to correct perceived faults with processualist and Marxian theories. This temporal sequence also roughly correlates with the order in which we used these theories over time. Such a neat succession of guiding theories in archaeology and in our own work is largely an illusion. Culture history, for example, was never extinguished despite the best efforts of the processualists. It still continues to inform research conducted today, as do theories drawn from all of the other schools of thought. In our own work, investigations guided by processualism co-existed from the beginning with research informed by culture history and Marxian perspectives. Such coexistence of seemingly contradictory frameworks results from the factors discussed in Chapter 1, especially difficulties in rejecting any ­theory definitively and the inability of one conceptual scheme to encompass the full complexity of human behavior. Nonetheless, there were different dominant, if never exclusive, questions that we addressed using different bodies of theory during each field season in the basin. It is the order of those questions that we follow here.

3 Culture History

The field of archaeology started to take shape in Europe during the nineteenth century. It emerged during a period of growing unease. Europeans had previously been able to answer questions about who our ancestors were and how they lived based on established worldviews, most rooted in interpretations of the Bible. Those models of and for reality held that human and world history were short and largely unchanging. Beginning in the eighteenth century, accidental discoveries of extinct life forms, some associated with human artifacts, were coming to light across Europe. This suggested a greater antiquity for our species than many had imagined. Publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 did little to quiet this unease. Though humans were not directly addressed in the text’s first edition, Darwin’s ideas of species change through adaptation and natural selection clearly applied to us. All of these developments conspired to raise questions of human origins and culture change that most had thought were settled. Answering such queries required a systematic study of humanity’s previously unappreciated deep antiquity. Archaeology arose to meet that need.

Scrambling to Fill the Chasm of Prehistory Evolving Solutions Filling with knowledge what was now seen as our chasm of ignorance about human history took several forms in late nineteenth-century E ­ urope. The dominant view came to be called cultural evolutionism. Its practitioners took the growing information on cultural diversity and put it to use in telling the story of human cultural history. Drawing on long established premises in European thought, these nineteenth-century thinkers argued that: • •

the story of human cultural change was “progressive,” proceeding from simple to complex forms of technology and social organization; all human societies underwent the same sequence of changes from a common, technologically and socially simple beginning;

42  Culture History

• •

existing societies around the world were living at different stages in that shared progressive succession; by arranging those societies into an evolutionary series, with Europe at the pinnacle, the different stages of human cultural change could be reconstructed.

Evolutionists argued that each society shared in a common human culture but to differing degrees. Explaining any human action was not dependent on placing it within the context of the beliefs and values that characterized a particular culture. Instead, observed human behaviors were accounted for by setting them within the supposed evolutionary sequence through which all cultures passed en route to what were taken to be more rational, moral, and complex forms of living. If nineteenth-century Western Europe and the United States represented the current apex of this trend, then it could be argued, for example, that polygyny (one husband with several wives) represented an earlier form of marriage than the monogamy (one wife, one husband) found in nineteenth-century Western Europe and the United States. As for why polygyny was practiced in some places, the evolutionists’ answer was that the people engaging in these unions were living an earlier stage in the development of marriage. Why they were stuck in that stage was not a major question that evolutionists considered. All behaviors could be arranged in this supposedly ascending order and all could be explained by reference to the same universal laws of evolution. What were the implications of this theory for archaeology? For one thing, the material that was coming to light through a growing number of field projects was organized according to the evolutionary stage it was thought to represent. This was not new. By the mid-nineteenth century researchers in Scandinavia were making sense of the area’s ancient cultures and how they changed by using the Three-Age System. The three parts are the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, each named for a particular technology. The Stone Age sequence was itself refined into three stages: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic, respectively referring to the old, middle, and late periods of stone tool manufacturing. Using this system, sites could be characterized by the technology used to fashion some of the artifacts found on them. The ThreeAge System was a breakthrough. It allowed archaeologists to distinguish settlements from different time periods, taking the first steps towards organizing materials from a region into a coherent narrative of culture change. It was soon adopted in other parts of Europe, the British Isles, and western Asia. The terms are still with us today as an easy and popular way to characterize prehistory. Their continued use does not necessarily imply that culture evolved according to unilineal principles. Converting the Three-Age System into an account of human cultural evolution was relatively easy. After all, what is the Three-Age System but an evolutionary sequence of technology? Take for example American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s account of human cultural evolution

Culture History  43

as outlined in his book Ancient Society (1877). Using what was then known of contemporary people, Morgan proposed that culture went through three basic stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization, the first two of which were subdivided into lower, middle, and upper sub-stages. Each stage was marked by specific technologies. For instance, Morgan thought that barbarian cultures had domesticated plants and animals and worked metal; they did not, however, have writing systems. Morgan provided a form of the Three-Age System that, he argued, applied not just to the Middle East and Europe but all over the globe. As all cultures went through the same stages in the same order, all archaeological materials could be ordered using these principles. What would a museum set up according to nineteenth-century evolutionary principles look like? The Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford University in the United Kingdom intentionally preserves that arrangement (https://www. prm.ox.ac.uk/pittrivers). Here objects are arranged by technological type (e.g., spearheads in one set of cases, baskets in another) regardless of where they were found. Within each technological type the items were organized to highlight what were thought of as progressive changes in the evolution of that material. Thus bronze spearheads succeed those made of stone and are, in turn, followed by those fashioned from iron. Most of these materials were collected from living populations. A bronze spearhead from 3000 BC in England was the same, in evolutionary terms, as one found still being used in AD 1450 in the Andes. They represent the same evolutionary stage of human cultural development. Particular Problems A counter to this position was developed by Franz Boas (see Box 3.1), an anthropologist who emigrated to the United States from Germany. In his view, each culture consists of a coherent and unique body of learned premises. Those essential values, or norms, were supposedly shared by all members of a culture and arose from that culture’s distinctive history. There are no regularities in how cultures evolve and each must be understood in its own terms. This view, called particularism, was very influential in the development of archaeology and anthropology in the United States. Boas’s views were strongly influenced by Romanticism (Figure 3.1). This broad intellectual tradition developed in Europe by the late eighteenth century in strong reaction against scientific approaches to knowledge espoused by Enlightenment scholars. Enlightenment thinkers in general argued that all aspects of reality could best be understood through the application of human reason. Rather than depending on interpretations of reality based on ancient philosophers or the Bible, knowing the world required making systematic observations, analyzing those findings, and explaining the results by reference to well-grounded theories. It was Enlightenment thought that helped inspire people like Charles Darwin to challenge existing European

44  Culture History BOX 3.1  Franz Boas Franz Boas was trained in the natural sciences in his native Germany before migrating to the United States in 1887. By the time of his arrival he had gravitated to the new field of anthropology after having conducted research among the Inuit of Baffin Island in the Arctic and initiated studies with the Kwakiutl of Northwest North America. Boas was perhaps the most influential anthropologist in the United States through the middle of the twentieth century, training the vast majority of the professionals who would go on to found Anthropology departments across the country. In essence, Boas argued strongly against evolutionary and racial theories of human behavior, insisting instead that: 1) Each culture is unique, cannot be ranked, and is the product of its own distinct history. 2) Human behavior is caused by the norms and values that characterize each culture. 3) These norms and values were passed down across the generations by learning and not inherited biologically. 4) Culture change happened as people learned new ways of living. 5) There were no biological limits, such as those thought to be imposed by race, on what people could learn and the cultures they could create. 6) The serious study of human cultures required adopting methodological relativism in which the researcher did not allow their value judgments to interfere with describing and explaining the culture under study. Though anthropology in the United States and elsewhere has changed quite a bit from Boas’s day, these basic premises still underlie a great deal of the research conducted in the field.

worldviews and to try and replace them with a more scientific approach to understanding nature. The nineteenth-century evolutionists also saw themselves as continuing the Enlightenment tradition. Scholars, like Boas, who were influenced by Romanticism pushed back against what they saw as the excesses of Enlightenment thinking, especially in the study of human behavior. There are several aspects of ­Romanticism that are particularly relevant to the early development of U.S. anthropology. Romantics cast Enlightenment science as overly concerned with breaking natural phenomena down into their constituent elements and modeling their relations as governed by general laws (recall F = ma from Chapter 1). Such an approach to human behavior was judged by Romantics to be inadequate, in part because the cultures in which those behaviors occurred were not organic phenomena but human creations. Those creations, in turn, were characterized by distinct configurations of learned beliefs and values unified by a shared “genius” that was unique to particular cultures. People’s behaviors could not, therefore, be explained by reducing them to

Culture History  45

Figure 3.1  Diagram illustrating the general temporal relations among the major intellectual movements discussed in the text.

abstract formulae which applied everywhere at all times. Instead, understanding why people acted as they did required paying close attention to the enduring principles that distinguished each culture and made the lives of its members coherent. It was those shared premises that defined a culture’s worldview. It was those varied worldviews that motivated human action. Romanticism thus encouraged anthropologists to treat each culture as an aggregate of people united by shared cultural precepts that shaped individual beliefs and actions and arose from that group’s unique history. The analytical and comparative approach of nineteenth-century Evolutionism was rejected along with its assumptions of universal laws governing culture change. Rather, anthropologists, inspired by Boas and his many students, argued that the histories of individual cultures could not be subsumed within one grand, overarching scheme. Documenting these unique human cultures and their distinctive developmental paths were to be the major goals of anthropology and archaeology. In addition, Boas and his colleagues denied that cultures could be ranked according to some universal standard as the Evolutionists had done. Rather, they adopted a stance of methodological relativism which held that each culture must be understood in its own terms and not judged and categorized according to some supposed pan-human standard of rationality. Going along with these precepts was the Boasian promotion of an emic understanding of human behavior. In general, an emic approach involves understanding a culture in terms that make sense to its members.

46  Culture History

Boas and his intellectual allies also argued strongly against racial theories of human behavior that were prominent in the late nineteenth through middle twentieth centuries. These views generally stressed that each culture’s unity was based on its members’ shared biology and not on learned ways of thinking and acting. Culture was, in short, an expression of underlying physical features, passed on by biological inheritance. Such racial understandings of culture encouraged a relatively static view of human behavior. What people thought and did was limited by the biology with which they were born. Going along with this view was the strong tendency to rank cultures based on supposed differences in the presumed biologically based intelligence and rationality of their members. Nineteenth-century Evolutionists also ranked cultures by their positions in what they saw as a universal sequence of culture change. Some were more evolved than others. The difference was that the Evolutionist perspective is analogous to a slowly moving escalator on which all people are heading to the same destination. For racialists, each race was on its own escalator, travelling in incommensurable directions, arriving at different floors, each arranged at distinct levels. In opposition to these reductionist views of culture Boasians offered a sui generis perspective in which each culture was shaped by purely cultural forces. Diffusion and migration were, they contended, the primary cultural forces shaping cultures and their histories.

Archaeology and Culture History Culture history emerged in the U.S. as an extension of Boasian anthropology. The oldest of the schools within archaeology, it dominated the field from the early through the middle twentieth century. Culture historians, like their predecessors, faced the daunting task of organizing the rapidly accumulating collection of archaeological materials from various parts of the world. In line with Boasian anthropology’s goals, they needed to arrange these finds in ways that told the histories of individual cultures. Central to these efforts was what eventually came to be called the definition of space-time systematics. Space Space in this formulation refers to the physical distribution of archaeological materials. These patterns were crucial to defining the central units of study, archaeological cultures. Following the pioneering work of such researchers as V. Gordon Childe (see Box 3.2), archaeological and living cultures were seen as analogous. Scholars like Childe believed that members of an archaeological culture shared learned core beliefs and values that gave rise to patterned behaviors employing similar artifacts, those values, behaviors, and artifacts all being distinctive of a culture. Cultural boundaries were reconstructed from the spatial distribution of those diagnostic material remains. Crucial in this definition of archaeological cultures, their boundaries and

Culture History  47

contents, was the trait. Traits were treated as discrete units of behavior and the material remains resulting from those actions. A particular style of pottery decoration might be a trait, as could a specific form of architecture or a kind of stone tool. Every culture, living and extinct, was understood as a territorially bounded configuration of traits that together set each culture apart from all others. By-and-large, these features were thought to have accumulated in a slow continuous manner over the years, each culture shaping its characteristic suite of traits according to its own core principles. Box 3.2  V. Gordon Childe V. Gordon Childe is one of archaeology’s most original theorists. The principles he elaborated in his numerous studies of European prehistory were, and remain, widely influential. Early in Childe’s career he played a leading role in outlining crucial features of the culture historical school. Though Childe remained committed to diffusion as a major process of cultural change, his later work innovatively incorporated concepts derived from Marxian thought into explanations of long-term culture transformations. For example, Childe argued that while metallurgy may have originally diffused to Europe from the Near East, its historical significance was largely determined by how it was involved in the different relations of production that characterized these areas. Copper and bronze working in 4th millennium BC southern Mesopotamia was, he argued, rigorously controlled by monarchs who used monopolies over metal tools and weapons to sustain their exclusive rights to paramount power. Consequently, innovations in metallurgy that could have led to increased efficiency in, and decreased costs of, production were stymied by elites who were uninterested in any changes that might make copper and bronze implements more generally available. Europe’s more egalitarian social structures, in contrast, encouraged innovations in metalworking as itinerant smiths sought to increase production to meet the growing needs of numerous clients. Social relations of production, therefore, could frustrate or encourage technological changes (or the forces of production), those transformations then affecting a culture’s history. Hence, Childe contended that southern Mesopotamian societies continued to stagnate as oppressive regimes blocked technological innovations. European societies, on the other hand, flourished, spurred by free competition within relatively open markets. Childe’s original formulation is no longer widely accepted. Nonetheless, his attempts to explain the past by paying attention to relations among social and economic processes continue to inspire investigations within and outside Europe to this day

48  Culture History

Traits can include a wide array of practices and things thought to be distinctive of a culture. Culture historians, however, had to work with what they found, artifacts and features (basically, immovable artifacts, such as buildings). It was, therefore, very important for culture historians to define as clearly as possible the characteristics of artifacts that they thought were most sensitive to variation in cultural values and to use those attributes to organize artifacts and features into categories—types. Types allow researchers to organize large bodies of materials into a manageable number of groups, rather than trying to consider each and every artifact on its own. Culture historians were deeply involved in the development of classification systems that allowed them to use artifacts and features, treated as traits, in defining cultural borders. The first step in developing a classification system is identifying the measurable characteristics of artifacts. Such aspects are also called “morphological,” meaning related to form or structure. These measurable qualities are attributes of an object. Examples of morphological characteristics are the length, width, and thickness of a stone tool, the color of paint used to decorate a pot, and the material used to make a stone for grinding grain. ­A fter attributes are defined, the researcher looks at which of these variables make up recurring clusters. Such clusters then become types. A morphological type, therefore, consists of a collection of individual items that share the same measurable attributes. For an artifact to be included in a type it must fit within the parameters used to define that category. Types defined this way and as used by culture historians are normative. This means that the central tendency is more significant than the range of variation. Imagine trying to categorize a collection of coffee mugs based on their diameters. You measure the openings and determine that most fall out into two categories; ones with diameters of 4–4.9cm and others with orifices of 6–6.9cm. These are the central tendencies around which you will define your mug typology. Examples with orifices of 5.1cm are either ignored or treated as minor variants of the norms. This approach to defining types fit well with normative views of culture within Boasian anthropology. In this school of thought, all participants in a culture share ideas about how to act in daily life. While there will be some variation from individual to individual, the commonalities, or norms, are what is significant to defining that culture, not the range of variation. The central tendencies of types, like the norms of a culture, were thought to capture the essence of the entity they typified. There are many morphological types you can create from any collection of things. Just looking around, you could classify pens by the color of their ink. Alternatively, you could create a typology of cars based on their lengths, assigning each vehicle to a different size class. In each case, following this version of classification, your types would be defined by the most common colors or lengths. While you can come up with many typologies you have to ask yourself, “What’s the point?” Types are simplifications of reality intended to serve a purpose. For culture historians the goal of typology was to aggregate materials into manageable numbers of units whose distributions across

Culture History  49

space revealed cultural boundaries. To do so, they needed to organize objects into distinct classes such as pottery, stone tools, architecture, and divide those classes into types that they thought most clearly expressed the underlying values and beliefs of the ancient cultures from which those things derived. In creating their typologies they emphasized variables of style. Stylistic attributes are those features on an artifact or feature that reflect choices made by the people who fashioned and used an object. Choices can be made at several levels. Take making a pot. The artisan has a choice of what clays to use, the manner of shaping the vessel, how to fire it, and what decorations to apply to it. The stylistic variables of greatest interest to culture historians were those they thought were the clearest expressions of a culture’s core values. It was elements of decoration that culture historians generally believed were the most sensitive expressions of these underlying premises. This is because decorative attributes were, of all measureable features of an artifact, thought to be the freest to vary according to the culturally conditioned ­assumptions of an object’s maker. How, say, a pot was made was also a choice. It was, however, one that was more narrowly constrained by technological limits on pottery manufacture than were the designs that adorned the vessel. Questions of technological style (including choices in how a pot is to be made) and their relations to cultural precepts are now much debated. In the early twentieth century, however, culture historians settled on decorative attributes as the traits that best represented the values that constituted unique ancient cultures. It was the spatial distributions of the types distinguished by these stylistic attributes that were used to define cultural boundaries. We will apply “style” to this class of decorative features throughout the rest of the chapter. In sum, an archaeological culture is defined by a set of regularly occurring traits recorded at closely spaced sites. Those traits consist of artifact types composed of items that shared the same stylistic attributes. Archaeological cultures, in turn, that shared a similar array of traits, were grouped into a culture area. “Similarity” is based on sites sharing a preponderance of traits. The sites do not have to share 100 percent of their traits in order to be included within a given culture area. The material and behavioral commonalities that defined culture areas resulted, it was thought, from the spread of traits more or less uniformly from an innovating center. Trait distributions were broadly limited by environmental factors. Traits from one area would not easily diffuse to neighboring territories with markedly different physical settings. Time The temporal component of time–space systematics takes us to questions of culture change. Given that cultures are composed of traits, change processes had to account for transformations in those traits. Culture historians generally explained these shifts with reference to three processes: independent invention, the creation of new behaviors and materials through local efforts; diffusion, the spread of ideas and/or goods without the permanent movement

50  Culture History

of people; and, migration, in which people come along with the goods and ideas. Of these three engines of change, independent invention was given the least attention. Culture historians, like Boasian anthropologists, assumed that people were inherently uncreative. We are more prone to adopt an idea or artifact style from someone else than to develop one ourselves. Independent invention must ultimately be the source of all traits. Nonetheless, these new creations were so rare that they were not offered as an explanation of cultural transformations unless diffusion and migration could be excluded. Independent invention, diffusion, and migration cover a variety of causal mechanisms. Each can take place for a wide array of reasons. For example, if a new style of projectile point diffused to an area, did the people learn about it from traveling to the origin point, find out from traders, or perhaps the style was produced by itinerant artisans? In addition, questions of why one trait diffused but another did not were often left unanswered. Just as a culture’s boundaries were drawn using the spatial distribution of types defined by stylistic variables, so too were their histories reconstructed from studying changes in these categories. In addition to traits constituting a culture’s surviving content it was argued that their decorative styles changed more rapidly than did other aspects of those traits. How a pot was made, for example, might well change but such transformations would likely be very slow. There are many steps involved in fashioning a pot, they are learned early in life, and take a long time to acquire. Once you know how to make a ceramic vessel you tend to stick with that procedure. How a container was decorated, however, would likely be subject to more rapid shifts as new forms of decoration were relatively easy to learn and implement. Archaeologists want the time periods they define based on changes in artifacts to be as short as possible. The fewer years these intervals cover, the more precise we can be in tracing processes like domestication or the emergence of new social forms. Defining these periods based on changes in decorative styles, therefore, holds the greatest promise for constructing those fine-grained chronologies. The first crucial question was what sites or portions of them dated to the same period. Deposits at a settlement that contained the same stylistically defined taxa in approximately the same proportions were deemed to be roughly contemporary and comprised a component in the site’s occupation. All artifacts pertaining to that component comprised an assemblage. Settlements occupied for only one period were single-component sites, while those used for longer periods had multiple components. All components found at sites within a given area in which the same stylistically defined categories were found in approximately the same percentages belonged to the same phase. Each phase was equivalent to a distinct period in a culture’s history. The chronological order of components and phases was reconstructed by culture historians using principles of stratigraphy and seriation. Studies of stratigraphy, the arrangement of earth layers (strata) revealed in an archaeological excavation, specified the course of stylistic change based on the relative depths of items bearing certain styles within undisturbed, superimposed

Culture History  51

archaeological deposits. The older the style, the deeper underground would be the materials on which it was found (Figure 3.2). Where such deep, well-preserved deposits were lacking, components could be placed in a time sequence using seriation. There are two kinds of seriation, presence and frequency. Presence seriation is based on the ordering of distinct styles in a chronological sequence. It is frequently used with sealed deposits, like burials, in which grave goods are included. For example, in excavating a cemetery you find that some interments have only red-painted bowls and others solely have orange-painted bowls. One possibility is that this distinction is caused by differences in the times when these people were buried. Orange and redpainted ceramic containers were prevalent in two distinct periods. That may be a good inference to the best explanation based on the culture historical assumption that artifact styles are traits that change with time. You would need more evidence to establish this claim and to determine the order of those presumed stylistic shifts. What comes first, orange or red-painting? Finding two superimposed burials, the upper (more recent) with red-painted containers and the older (lower) one with orange painting would help to support your first inference. That is a problem with seriation. It is often impossible to determine the order of stylistic change without other evidence, like that provided by stratigraphy in this case.

Figure 3.2  R  endering of an early section from the southwestern U.S. illustrating how architectural and cultural sequences are combined in this case to distinguish different archaeological phases. Note how each of the major stratigraphic units is linked to a phase defined by a distinct set of ceramics (different classes of glazed wares and black-on-white decorated pottery). Drawn after Figure 6.6 in Trigger, B. (2006) A History of Archaeological Thought. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

52  Culture History

Frequency seriation is based on differences in the proportions of the stylistically defined categories found within deposits. Applications of frequency seriation proceed from the premise that stylistic change is gradual, a basic assumption of Boasian anthropology. A style within any material class (such as pottery) increases in popularity over time to a maximum point before dwindling to obscurity as it is replaced by other styles on the rise. Different components within a region will therefore be characterized by varying proportions of the stylistically defined taxa pertaining to specific material classes such as pottery or stone tools. Ordering components in ways that conform to seriation’s assumptions creates a chronological sequence. Once again, it is impossible to tell which end of that continuum is the earliest and which is the latest without additional information. Culture, history, and material objects take on specific meanings in culture history. Culture can be imagined as a receptacle into which history, operating primarily through diffusion and migration, poured objects and their associated behaviors, or traits. People then shaped these items and acts into unique trait configurations distinctive of particular cultures according to their shared ideas and rules. Individual behavior was determined by these patterned wholes, all participants sharing equally in the beliefs and practices of the cultures to which they belonged. This normative view of culture imagined that people’s actions were narrowly channeled by cultural rules. History, in turn, was generally, though not invariably, viewed as a continuous process by which traits gradually accumulated and changed within a culture. Because it was not possible to predict which traits might appear in any particular culture at any specific moment, history was not thought to be governed by general laws. Variations in the forms and styles of material remains were used to define cultures and distinguish phases in their histories. Culture historians, therefore, were primarily concerned with determining temporal and spatial patterning for as wide a range of different cultures as possible. In this way, they imposed order on the ever-increasing and diverse array of archaeological materials retrieved from around the world. They did so in ways that highlighted the differences among cultures and the distinct paths their histories took. To get some sense of how pervasive these conceptual structures are today, think about how museums that deal with archaeological remains are organized. No longer are items grouped by material category, laid out to describe a presumed universal evolutionary sequence. Instead, they are arranged by culture areas and time periods within those units. Look also at the listing of archaeology classes given in your Anthropology department. Most likely you will not see titles like Early Barbarism or Late Savagery, as you would if Morgan’s views still held sway. Instead you will probably find offerings on Mesoamerican Prehistory or Southwest U.S. Archaeology. The culture historical units of culture, culture area, and phase are now taken for granted as ways of structuring knowledge, organizing academic specialties, teaching classes, and pursuing careers.

Culture History  53

Summary of Culture Historical Premises Culture historians focused on defining cultural boundaries and histories, relying primarily on the forces of diffusion and migration to explain changes in the stylistically defined traits that comprised cultures. Each culture was treated as a unique outcome of these unpredictable historical processes, processes that were reconstructed through the study of material forms and styles in diverse media. Even though the school’s practitioners were interested in the spatial extent of what they saw as cultures, they did not recognize the importance of looking at the range of variation in an area’s sites. This led them to study primarily large sites which were thought to be typical of a culture. In addition, these sizable settlements tended to have been lived in for longer periods than smaller ones. Studying the resulting series of superimposed strata that accumulated at an extensive site led to reconstructing how artifact styles changed through time. Because culture was seen as normative, and large sites best represented those norms, it was enough to find, map, and dig deep trenches at one or a few extensive settlements to reconstruct the time–space systematics for an entire culture. Subsequent analyses of finds emphasized organizing them into typologies whose categories were defined by shared stylistic attributes. The resulting reports often took the form of detailed accounts of phases, the material taxa that constituted them, and their temporal sequence. The school’s conception of culture limited research and interpretation. Because people were not inventive, change usually was due to something introduced from the outside by diffusion or migration. The perceived uniqueness of each culture’s form and history meant that generalizations about cultural processes were not possible. Cultures could be compared but not with the goal of identifying developmental regularities. Instead, comparisons might show the sources of innovations spread through diffusion or the original homes of migrating groups. Culture history remains a potent force in archaeology. Basic dating procedures and definitions of culture areas that were developed in this school are so deeply embedded in all archaeological practices as to be nearly invisible. Nevertheless, simplistic assumptions about the utility of reducing cultures to trait lists and accounting for their histories primarily through diffusion and migration have been generally superseded by more sophisticated interpretations. In some senses, all archaeologists are culture historians because all of us must describe the temporal sequences that exist in the areas we study. Insofar as researchers insist that these sequences are shaped by unique circumstances particular to a specific place they are continuing the culture history tradition.

Culture History and the Naco Valley John Henderson, then of Cornell University, began work in the 100 km 2 Naco Valley in 1974. He was drawn to the basin by the site of Naco’s renown as a Late Postclassic (AD 1300–1532) trading center. Largely buried by the modern town of the same name, Late Postclassic Naco was a sufficiently important Precolumbian economic node that it attracted the attention of such leading

54  Culture History

lights of the Spanish Conquest as Hernán Cortés. Cortés sent ambassadors (of sorts—more like advance scouts) to Naco soon after defeating the Mexica (or Aztecs). He wanted to establish his authority over what would become Honduras, an area also claimed by rival conquistadores from points south and by restless subordinates from what is now Guatemala. Partly as a result of this strife, Naco appeared fairly often in early Spanish documents, some of which have been published in recent times. Naco, therefore, figured in discussions of Southeast Mesoamerican prehistory going back to the early twentieth century, even attracting some early archaeological research. A 3-week program of excavation and mapping was conducted at Naco and several nearby sites in 1936. No follow-up investigations were pursued here for another 38 years. Southeast Mesoamerica: Beyond the Pale Why did nearly four decades pass between research projects in the Naco Valley? The situation is not unique to this basin. Most surrounding portions of Southeast Mesoamerica suffered from similar neglect. Why was the archaeology of Southeast Mesoamerica not considered important? The answer has much to do with how the area was perceived through prevailing culture historical perspectives. Box 3.3  Traits Used to Define Late Classic Period Lowland Maya Culture through to the 1970s Architecture • • •

Sheathing large constructions with shaped blocks. Lime plaster used to coat building facades and floors. Corbel vaulting.

Building Forms • • •

Temples, tall, generally square pyramids with terraced flanks that supported religious constructions on their summits. Ballcourts, composed of two long platforms that bordered a central playing alley. Palaces, long, high, rectangular platforms that supported elite residential and administrative complexes.

Building Arrangements • •

Tendency to organize all constructions, regardless of their sizes, orthogonally around an open patio. Acropolises composed of massive, elevated platforms that supported places of elite residence, administration, and worship.

Culture History  55 Sculpture •

•

Stelae, free-standing stone monuments that usually depict rulers whose actions and accomplishments are celebrated in accompanying texts carved into the monument. Figures of rulers and supernaturals carved or set into temple and palace facades.

Ritual Deposits • •

Caches, deposits of valuable objects usually interred on or near the center of a temple, ballcourt, or palace construction. Tombs, richly outfitted interments within masonry receptacles, often built into the heart of temples or palaces.

Artifacts •

Distinctive, elaborately painted pottery containers decorated with figurative scenes painted in two or more colors.

Writing •

•

Hieroglyphic inscriptions mostly devoted to extoling the accomplishments of rulers and setting their achievements within elaborate systems of interlocking calendars Calendric systems: the lowland Maya kept accurate records of time’s passage in several calendars based on patterns in the movement of certain celestial bodies.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, the attention of archaeologists and the public alike was riveted by the dramatic discoveries made at lowland Maya centers such as Tikal, Chichén Itzá, and Copán. Early archaeological work, therefore, set out to define the limits of “Maya culture” (see Box 3.3). Researchers spread far and wide, enduring malaria and uncooperative mules, in search of sites bearing the distinctive hallmarks of this civilization. Most of the pioneering research in Southeast Mesoamerica was directed toward tracing the distribution of such traits. Once the limits of Maya culture were determined, research intensified inside this zone and abruptly declined outside it. Diffusion and migration, the great causal mechanisms in Culture Historical explanations, helped to direct attention away from Southeast Mesoamerica. No large centers with dramatic public artwork were known in the Southeast outside the lowland Maya capitals of Copán (in Honduras) and Quiriguá (in Guatemala). Consequently, it was generally thought that ideas or ­populations from this area did not play significant roles in the genesis of

56  Culture History

lowland Maya culture. Innovations might have diffused from the Maya lowlands to the Southeast sparking developments there. Influences did not flow the other way. This is because, to culture historians, traits spread outward from where their styles were most fully elaborated. Those innovating centers were in the Maya lowlands, not in Southeast Mesoamerica. With cultural boundaries drawn by the 1930s, even the sporadic research that Southeast Mesoamerica had enjoyed up to that time declined in frequency as work in the Maya lowlands intensified. Southeast Mesoamerica was not inherently uninteresting. It failed to attract scholarly attention because research there did not seem rewarding within the predominant theory of the time. Useful knowledge and successful careers would come from investigations in the Maya heartland. Intensified Interest: 1960s–1970s Culture historians increasingly shared the archaeological stage with Processualists by the late 1950s (discussed in Chapter 4). Processualists sought explanations of human behavior in the relations that existed among material and cultural factors—in particular, how people adapted to their physical environments and how those adaptations determined the course of human history. Initially, such shifts did little to stir interest in Southeast Mesoamerican prehistory in general, and the Naco Valley in particular. The boundaries drawn by culture historians still defined the basic units of analysis. Understanding Maya history required work within an identifiable culture. If you wanted to investigate such major questions of the time as how and why social hierarchies developed and political centers grew, you were better off working where these processes had achieved obvious heights, where the sites were large and the political structures extensive. The Naco Valley was a sideshow to the main event. By the late 1960s, however, there was increasing recognition among processualists that every culture was connected to others from which its members received essential goods needed for their survival and societal functioning but which could not be found at home. Trade studies had begun. Defined as the peaceful movement of items among people living in different cultures, trade was increasingly seen as a possible trigger for culture change. William Rathje, for example, argued that the exchange of goods was crucial to the development of lowland Maya realms. Lacking many basic resources, especially stone needed to make tools, the lowland Maya were forced to secure these goods from distant sources (compare this argument with the one proposed by Algaze, outlined in Chapter 12 for the development of southern Mesopotamian states). Such trade required organizing: 1) people who produced and collected the items to be exported; 2) folks to transport these goods to wherever they were to be exchanged for needed resources;

Culture History  57

3) individuals to bring the imports home; and 4) distribution of the imports in the recipient society. Hierarchies, the appearance of cities, and all forms of social complexity might result from organizing these processes. One outcome of trade studies was that cultures, still the basic units of study, were seen as having porous borders. Even areas that seemed remote might have contributed through trade to the appearance and persistence of major states. It was only a matter of time before someone would think to take another look at Southeast Mesoamerica. Given the site of Naco’s important role in trade during the last Precolumbian centuries, the valley bearing its name was a likely focus of research on ancient long-distance exchanges. By 1968, archaeological investigations in the area had begun in earnest, and John Henderson rode this wave into the Naco Valley 6 years later. We washed up in the valley 12 months after that. It is important to realize that it was not changes in the Naco Valley itself that led to its study. It was still pretty much the same place in 1974 that it had been in 1944 and 1904, with the exception that the main road had been paved in the early 1960s. Changes in theory at first marginalized, and later emphasized, the area for study. Even so, Southeast Mesoamerica was not necessarily being investigated during the 1970s because it was seen as important in its own right. The area was examined for what it might contribute to studies of lowland Maya developments. Perhaps the Southeast was a source of trade goods that the Maya needed, that were essential to the development of their powerful states. The Naco Valley went from being beyond the margins of lowland Maya culture to being part of its frontier or periphery. Each of the terms applied to Southeast Mesoamerica at that time—boundary, border, frontier, periphery—resulted from a specific theoretical position. These positions specify how cultures are defined and whether or not they are bounded, distinct entities. For example, “boundary” implies that cultures have clear limits. “Frontier,” in turn, fits well with the notion of a culture in the process of expanding its control over territory. “Periphery” generally presupposes porous borders through which innovations and influence pass to small-scale societies. Words have consequences, consequences strongly conditioned by the theories in which they function. One thing is clear, all these terms have negative connotations. Their application diminishes western Honduras in particular, and Southeast Mesoamerica in general, by defining the area in terms of what it is not, i.e., not Maya or fully Mesoamerican. By the time Pat started working in the Naco Valley it was considered to be part of the Southeast Maya Periphery. It might have been a source of goods, but its people were not seen as active participants in innovations occurring in the core. Still, it was a start and this is the perspective we happily brought with us when we joined John Henderson in Honduras.

58  Culture History

Space–Time Systematics: 1975–1977 The theoretical stance Pat crafted by the time she began her dissertation research in the Naco Valley combined elements of the culture history perspective so strong at the University of Pennsylvania where we did our graduate work and strains of processualism prevalent in archaeological writings at the time. We will focus here on the culture historical aspects of her work leaving a discussion of how Pat’s research was influenced by processualism to the next chapter. Pat, like her mentor John Henderson, was convinced that constructing ­basic time–space frameworks was a first priority. Linking the phases defined in this process to those known from surrounding areas was also important. Pat would try to correlate developments in the Naco Valley with those reported from the better-studied neighboring Maya lowlands. This made practical sense. Very little was known about the prehistory of the Naco and surrounding valleys in 1975. Establishing the local chronology and placing this sequence in its broader context would require comparing Naco Valley material styles with those used to define culture historical sequences in the intensively studied Maya lowlands. The initial typologies created to achieve this aim centered on the analysis of ceramic fragments, or sherds. This is because broken pieces of pottery were common on archaeological sites in the valley; these fragments were often decorated, making it relatively easy to define types based on variation in ceramic styles. Recovered pottery artifacts were classified using the type–variety system that was then commonly applied in the study of lowland Maya pottery. Pat was familiar with this system as she had learned it from her mentor, Robert Sharer. It also made sense to define stylistic types employing the same approach used in creating the typologies to which Pat would be comparing her results. Type–variety classifications as they existed in the 1970s defined types by regular co-occurrences of decorative variables with a lesser emphasis placed on vessel forms. Hence, some of these early taxa included groups like La Champa Orange, distinguished by an orange slip covering the surface of open bowls, and Magdalena Red-on-Natural, where designs painted in red covered the un-slipped necks, rims, and shoulders of vertical-neck jars. It would be changes in these styles that would be used in reconstructing the phases of Naco Valley prehistory and in correlating that sequence with chronologies defined for the neighboring Maya lowlands. In addition, Pat paid special attention to one technological variable: composition of the paste (also known as paste ware; it is the combination of actual clay with natural or added tempering material). This modification of type–variety analysis was motivated by her recognition that some sherds had identical decorations but were made on different pastes. Ignoring these paste distinctions would have led to lumping different kinds of pottery into the same taxon, based exclusively on style. It was not clear at the time why that might be important. The significance of these paste distinctions would emerge much later in our research (see Box 3.4).

Culture History  59 Box 3.4  Type–Variety Classification System

The type–variety approach to classifying ceramics is based on assigning pottery fragments, or sherds, to a nested set of categories. There is no one way to conduct these studies but they tend to proceed as follows. Sherds from a particular collection unit (defined by its location vertically and horizontally within a site) are spread out for study. They are initially divided into wares based on macroscopically visible aspects of the clay, sometimes called the “paste,” from which a vessel was made. Common criteria for distinguishing among pastes include their color, texture, hardness, and the types and sizes of inclusions that were added to the clay to ensure that the pot did not crack or break during firing. Wares are subdivided into groups defined by regularly recurring, broadly similar constellations of surface treatments and decorative elements. Types constitute distinct taxa within a group, each set apart by specific combinations of stylistic features. Varieties are nested within types, characterized by slight differences in their decorative attributes. For example, the Jicaro Ware in the Late Classic Naco Valley is set apart by its light tan colored, fine-textured, hard-fired paste that contains few macroscopically visible inclusions. Within this ware is the La Champa Group that includes vessels made of this paste and slipped orange. Slips are fine clay washes that are applied over the surfaces of vessels before firing. The slip hardens and adheres to the container during the firing process, effectively changing the pot’s surface color from tan (the paste color of Jicaro Ware sherds) to orange. Types within the La Champa Group include La Champa (no decoration aside from the orange slip), Conejo Bichrome (red-painted designs adorn the orange-slipped surface), and Chamelecon Polychrome (marked by motifs painted in black and red on the orange slip). The last of these categories is sub-divided into two varieties: Chamelecon Polychrome: Chamelecon variety and Chamelecon Polychrome: Fine Line variety, based on the widths of the lines used to form the designs. Pat and John Henderson were also working within an intellectual framework that gave pride of place as agents of culture change to the basin’s lowland Maya neighbors during the period AD 600–900 (the Late Classic period as it was then defined). As noted, it was commonplace to assume that royal representatives from centers such as Copán and Quiriguá exercised considerable influence over the smaller societies of Southeast Mesoamerica. Significant transformations in political organization and population numbers, along with any shifts in other cultural traits, were thought to have resulted from contacts initiated by agents of the closest lowland Maya capitals. Reconstructing those interactions was of the utmost importance because such

60  Culture History

relations presumably played crucial roles in motivating local culture change. This argument is based on the principles of diffusion. Innovations arising in culture cores are adopted by those living on their margins. In this case, lowland Maya centers were seen as particularly creative locales from which influential concepts spread to their neighbors. These neighbors, for whatever reason, were not nearly as creative as the lowland Maya but certainly knew a good idea when they heard or saw one. The causal connections between foreign contact and local change were not at all clear in our minds at this time. To some extent, Pat presumed that upwardly mobile segments of Naco Valley populations would envy the power and achievements of lowland Maya rulers. Consequently, these peripheral elites would do everything they could to capture some of that charisma by importing valued goods and adopting distinctive practices (all thought of as traits) associated with lowland Maya lords. Such diagnostics of elite Maya power as elaborately painted ceramic vessels, carved jade, temples, and ballcourts would, thus, be concentrated at Late Classic Naco Valley political centers. The portable items likely arrived through inter-elite gift exchanges. Lowland Maya architectural forms, in turn, were replicated to serve as venues for the performance of sacred rites. In these ceremonies, Naco Valley rulers were thought to have interceded with powerful supernaturals on behalf of their communities, much as Maya notables did in their own capitals. In both cases, the potency of Maya lords was appropriated by their Naco Valley counterparts who engaged in ceremonies, that they alone within the basin could perform, using valuable foreign goods that only they could acquire. Still, Pat presumed that Naco Valley rulers did not command the power and prestige of their role models. What her theory led her to expect was the creation of a pale reflection of Maya greatness in the basin from AD 600 to 900. There was nothing inevitable about the perspective she took to the field. Pat could certainly have begun her studies from, say, a Marxist stance (see Chapter 5). That she was not attracted to these views has much to do with the time and place where we began our careers and what we made of the research potentials offered by those circumstances. Marxist theories had made little inroads into lowland Maya studies by the 1970s. Pat could have sought them out in the literature but was not inclined to do so as their relevance to her research was not obvious at the time. We eventually embraced this theoretical school, but it would take a while. Looking Beyond the Center In addition to research conducted at La Sierra under John Henderson’s direction, Pat pursued a survey designed to record the region’s settlement pattern, or the distribution of sites throughout the Naco Valley. These investigations, which constituted Pat’s dissertation research, were inspired by writings in processual archaeology. Aspects of the work most closely related to

Culture History  61

that school of thought are covered in Chapter 4. Settlement survey, though not originally integral to the culture history approach, was used by members of this school in some areas to amplify the results of excavations conducted at major political centers. In Pat’s case, she was interested in evaluating a simple demographic hypothesis: 1) During the Preclassic (1200 BC–AD 200), there was a very small population living in scattered hamlets; 2) In the Early Classic (AD 200–600), population began to rise, and some sites grew to be bigger and more complex than simple farming settlements; 3) The population peak occurred in the Late Classic (AD 600–900); ­socio-political complexity also was at its maximum then; 4) At the end of the Classic, there was a demographic and political collapse; 5) In the final prehistoric period, the Postclassic (AD 900–1532), there was a gradual increase in settlement until the arrival of the Spanish which initiated another collapse that would be beyond the purview of Pat’s work; 6) These trends would be measured in various ways, population numbers being inferred from the numbers and sizes of sites dated to specific periods and socio-political complexity assessed from the complexity of site hierarchies (see Box 3.5). This pattern of demographic and socio-political change closely mirrored the history of the Maya lowlands as it was known by the 1970s. Following from the Culture Historical propositions guiding the research, such parallels were both expected and thought to have been the results of the close, if unequal, ties between the two areas. Box 3.5  Site Hierarchies

Site hierarchies pertaining to specific phases are defined based on differences in the areas covered by settlements, the number of structures they contain, and the sizes of those buildings. An assumption that often underpins this work is that site hierarchies are the result of political processes. The more levels in the site hierarchy, the more complex the political system that operated through it. This reasoning is based on the premise that the power of ancient leaders residing at different sites is directly expressed in the number of people they could attract to their centers and the sizes of the edifices they could commission using the labor of those residents and the inhabitants of surrounding hamlets. The dimensions of settlements and buildings, therefore, are treated as accurate proxies for the relative power of local potentates.

62  Culture History

Initial Research Design Investigations pursued during 1974–1979 directly followed from the above theory and the need to construct a local chronology. John Henderson conducted excavations at the site of La Sierra, by far the largest Late Classic center in the basin. They aimed to reveal the full temporal sequence of valley settlement. Stratigraphy would, we hoped, help identify changes in artifact styles crucial to determining the different phases of Naco Valley occupation and their relative order. The stratigraphic work was concentrated at La Sierra because its great size suggested that it was occupied for the longest period of any valley settlement. There was, therefore, a good chance that deep, undisturbed deposits spanning multiple phases, each marked by its own distinctive material styles, were preserved here. This was the same reasoning that led early archaeologists to dig at major ancient cities in southern Mesopotamia (Chapter 12). Such correlations between a site’s extent and age do not always hold true but they provide a good premise from which to begin defining phases and their temporal order. La Sierra’s considerable size, and the presence of large-scale architecture there, further suggested that it was the most likely place to find evidence of external contacts. This proposition is founded on the notion that valley rulers commanded more labor to build their houses and associated structures than could those of lesser rank. The concentration of massive stone-faced platforms at La Sierra, therefore, pointed to the centralization of power at the center. If, as seemed likely at the time, transactions among ancient, hierarchically organized societies were conducted primarily by the nobility, then it is in their capitals that evidence for these contacts is most likely to be found. Since the theory in use predicted that local elite power was based, in part, on interactions with Maya nobles, what better place to look for evidence of those transactions than at the Late Classic valley capital? Pat’s settlement research proceeded out from La Sierra, her intention being to investigate all parts of the valley. Each identified site would be described in hand-written notes that covered such features as the settlement’s size, state of preservation, kinds of stones used in construction, and location with respect to natural resources likely to have been valued by the ancient inhabitants. Maps of all sites with visible architecture were to be made and every identified settlement would be located on the larger valley topographic map, a difficult task in pre-portable GPS days. Mapping procedures would be based on those we had learned during our student apprenticeships at large sites in Guatemala. There we were taught how to use survey instruments—optical transit, dumpy level, and compass and tape—to record the sizes and arrangements of ancient architecture. In drawing up these maps by hand we used a technique called rectified mapping (see Box 3.6). Dating these settlements would depend on analyzing artifacts, primarily ceramics, recovered from surface collections. The stylistically defined types identified in these materials would help place a site’s components within the valley-wide chronology that

Culture History  63

we hoped would emerge from the deep diggings at La Sierra. Things did not work out as planned. All of aspects of the planned research were informed by theory. Concepts like “Maya,” “periphery,” “diffusion,” “artifact style,” and even the very notion of discrete sites were products of the culture history school. The type– variety system for categorizing ceramics was itself based on the centrality of types that were normatively defined. Pat did not exactly follow the dictates of the culture history school. She pursued a settlement survey beyond the main Box 3.6  Rectified Mapping

This form of recording unexcavated structures goes back to the early work of Teobert Maler. Maler was a German explorer who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries recording archaeological sites in various parts of Mesoamerica. Unlike many contemporary explorers, Maler argued against removing sculptures and other artifacts from sites for display in European museums. Instead, he devoted himself to recording materials in situ, a commitment that led to his mapping numerous sites and, unusually for the time, publishing the results. In order to pursue this aim Maler developed mapping conventions that allowed him to convey basic information about structures and their arrangements in a simple yet accurate manner. Initially called “Malerized maps,” this approach involved recording large constructions on the assumption that their basal platforms were square or rectangular (hence the later name “rectified mapping”). The relative height of a platform was indicated by the distance between its basal outline and summit: the greater that distance on the map, the higher the building in the field. Surviving architectural details, such as standing walls, were drawn in as these were observed. Most of the buildings that Maler recorded were heavily overgrown and lacked clear architectural features visible on their surfaces. This is the case at many sites in the Maya lowlands and throughout Southeast Mesoamerica. Rectified mapping, therefore, remains one way of conveying information on the basal dimensions, heights, and arrangements of edifices, information that could be refined after excavation. These maps are non-literal representations of ancient edifices. One of the problems we faced in applying this technique is that rectified mapping was developed for much larger structures than we found in the Naco Valley. Platforms in the basin seldom reached 1 m in height and had much smaller areas than the monumental Maya edifices rectified mapping was intended to depict. This led us to develop standards for maps that differed from what we were taught, and these allowed us to map our relatively small sites adequately

64  Culture History

valley center of La Sierra. Pat also included considerations of vessel pastes in her type–variety classifications in order to make the system more sensitive to variation in how pottery containers were made. Nonetheless, the research we conducted in the Naco Valley from 1975–1979 was very much guided by the premises of culture history. Theory underpins all we do whether we are aware of it or not and our work was, and remains, no exception. Problems and Compromises Chronology and Settlement The chronological tests excavated at La Sierra were generally unsuccessful in revealing clear stratigraphic sequences. One problem, from our perspective, was the ancient Naqueños’ precocious concern with recycling. The valley’s residents had the archaeologically frustrating tendency to reuse old trash when raising later buildings. No sooner had garbage begun to accumulate in one place than it was scooped up and redeposited in the core of a platform under construction. Such practices make sense: working without the benefit of metal tools, probably using such objects as deer shoulder blades for shovels, prehistoric Naco Valley occupants would have found it much easier to dig up fairly recent trash than to dislodge large chunks of undisturbed soil. The building boom experienced at La Sierra from AD 600 to 900 worsened this penchant for recycling. What such reuse means is that cultural debris was not allowed to collect in one place for any considerable span and so stratigraphy at La Sierra was virtually nonexistent. Meanwhile, the settlement survey was experiencing its own challenges. It soon became obvious that it would not be possible to cover the entire valley with the time and money available. Consequently, Pat implemented a sampling design that would allow her to extrapolate the numbers, appearances, and locations of all valley settlement from the areas she could investigate. As described in Chapter 4 this did not prove to be feasible. Pat, therefore, switched to an opportunistic sampling design (see Box 3.7), starting with relocating those few sites recorded by archaeologists in the 1930s. This was difficult until she realized that the valley maps she was using to plot site distributions were drawn before a hurricane that substantially changed major natural features including the Rio Chamelecon, the main river running through the valley. That realization allowed her to begin the survey in earnest and relate what she was finding with the results the much earlier work. The major survey season was 1978, when Pat and Ed devoted all their time to walking the valley. Following the precepts of opportunistic sampling, we concentrated our investigations on land bordering stream courses. The assumption was that people in all periods of the valley’s history would need access to water. As a result, with only two field seasons left we needed to maximize our chances of finding the greatest number and variety of sites as possible. The initial survey concentrated on areas within 200 m on each side

Culture History  65 Box 3.7  Opportunistic Sampling

Archaeologists often have to make statements about some unit of interest, like an ancient culture, based on observations we can make of some segment of that entity. For example, we may reasonably assume that a particular river valley was once occupied by people who practiced a distinct culture. In order to answer the question of how many sites of different kinds were once occupied by members of that culture in that basin we would, ideally, like to walk the entire area and record every settlement we find. Such total coverage is rarely possible because of restrictions of time and money. Hence we frequently have to look at portions of the area of interest and extrapolate from these sample observations to the number, appearance, and distribution of all sites in that valley. To do so we need a sampling design to help us choose those valley segments we will investigate. Opportunistic sampling is one way of organizing that selection process (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of other options). In this approach, we choose where and what we will investigate based on factors that are relevant to us but may well not have been significant variables in the ancient population’s decisions on where to live and what to do in various locations. For example, an opportunistic sampling design may result in surveying those portions of a basin that are clear of vegetation, are convenient to reach, or are reported to contain sites by people who live in the research zone today. There is nothing inherently wrong with opportunistic sampling. What you can do with the results is limited, however. This is because it is very likely that the material you record and study does not accurately reflect the full range of behaviors in which the people you are studying engaged. For example, in surveying within the environs of a modern farming settlement you might learn a lot about ancient agricultural populations drawn to this area by the fertile soils and perennial water sources that still attract modern cultivators. In the process, you could well miss evidence of specialized ritual, hunting, or quarrying activities that were carried out away from farming settlements. Opportunistic sampling is a good way to find sites and most of us engage in this approach to some extent. This is fine as long as we are aware of what can and cannot be said based on such research. of these channels. We also recorded sites that we could see beyond the 200 m limit along with those reported by local residents. This work continued in 1979 but by then we had a problem. The surface collections on which Pat thought she could rely to date recorded sites were rarely found and, when present, were of very small size. This, combined with the disappointing lack of stratigraphy at La Sierra, meant that Pat would have

66  Culture History

to use another of archaeology’s chronological tools, ceramic frequency seriation, to create a temporal order. She would need to collect large numbers of sherds from some of the sites found on survey, classify them using the type– variety system, compare their frequencies, and then order them chronologically based on those numbers and the principles of frequency seriation. To get sizable ceramic samples would require digging test excavations at a sample of recorded sites. Ultimately, Pat excavated 19 of the 135 sites found on survey in 1975–1979, choosing those that spanned the full range of size and building arrangements then known for the valley. Criteria of size and form were emphasized because she suspected that these differences were related to when and how people lived at the settlements in question. The ways buildings were arranged at sites probably changed over time. Settlements that varied in their appearances, therefore, might yield materials dating to different phases. Digging at rural sites would focus on middens (cumulative trash deposits) where pottery and other artifacts were likely concentrated. These finds would be used for dating and as a guide to site function. Pat was also interested in data on structures: sizes, construction techniques, and how space and activities were allocated on and around buildings. This had less to do with dating and more with reconstructing how people lived at different times in the Naco Valley’s past. Finally, she wanted to figure out whether or not structure forms and site plans were temporally sensitive. This was important because Pat would not be able to dig at all 135 settlements found during the survey. She was going to have to generalize from the few places she excavated to date all or most of the sites in her sample if she was going to evaluate the original hypothesis about shifting population sizes and changes in socio-­ political complexity. If the excavations revealed that certain site forms were common in particular periods then Pat could date unexcavated settlements based on these arrangements of buildings. Because time and money are not infinitely expandable, the new demands on the survey program required making hard choices. Resources invested in carrying out the necessary excavations meant that the area surveyed had to be cut back and relatively few sites could be dug. As Mick Jagger once intoned, you don’t always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes you just might find you get what you need. We hoped he was right. In the end, 46,401 artifacts, including 45,000 pottery sherds, were analyzed from the excavations conducted at 19 sites and surface collections made at 38 other settlements as part of the Naco Valley survey. In addition, Pat studied 109 bone fragments and 385 g of unworked shell, largely snails that appeared to have been used for food. The valley maps were amended as much as possible to indicate any observed changes in drainage systems. Vegetation and land use were recorded both through direct observation and conversations with local residents. These factors influenced the visibility and preservation of sites. They may also have affected the settlement choices of the original inhabitants. The ceramic typology created in the course of this work proved to be an adequate dating method, a good thing since samples for Carbon14

Culture History  67

dating were very few and Pat did not have the funds to have them analyzed. Anchoring the seriation sequence in time was facilitated by the recovery of a few fragments of highly decorated imported vessels whose general chronological position was known from work conducted in surrounding areas. All of this work allowed Pat to make distribution maps of valley settlements for all time periods. Maya Influence? It was still crucial to identify those Maya innovations that were supposedly so central to culture change in the Naco Valley. John Henderson’s 1979 excavations at La Sierra were doing just that. Here he concentrated on the two adjoining plazas that make up the site core. Initial results yielded considerable information about architecture. A ballcourt, for example, was identified in the southern portion of the core (a description of research conducted in the ballcourt in 1988 can be found here: http://digital.kenyon. edu/­honduras/10391). This construction consists of two parallel, stone-faced platforms 1.8 m high. They border a playing alley measuring 10 m across and 29 m long, oriented slightly west of north. Ballcourts are common components of Southeast Mesoamerican political capitals during the centuries in question. At lowland Maya centers such as Copán, ballcourts are usually situated between major public plazas on the north and more secluded areas of elite ritual and residence on the south. This layout physically reinforces the ball game’s conceptual significance, mediating relations between supernatural forces associated with the heavens (linked to the north) and the underworld (associated with south). Rulers participating in this “sport” occupied a central place in cosmic dramas, interceding with supernatural powers that controlled the lives of all on earth. John Henderson and Pat presumed that the game had similar sacred meanings and political implications for La Sierra’s rulers. The organization of the La Sierra court, in fact, strongly suggested that what John Henderson was excavating was modeled on a prototype acquired directly from the lowland Maya center of Copán about 120 km to the southwest. The La Sierra and Copán main courts are both oriented roughly north–south and are backed on the south by a steep rise. At Copán, the massive, human-made acropolis, the ritual and administrative center of the ruling elite, was the backdrop to the main ballcourt. La Sierra’s architects built stone terraces into a natural ascent overlooking their court. They thereby replicated the general organization of the Copán model without going through the trouble of building an acropolis. These similarities between the Copán and La Sierra courts indicated that an important component of the basin’s capital was inspired by a lowland Maya model. Site core excavations overall, however, yielded very few artifacts useful for reconstructing external ties. Not only were imports scant, but cultural materials of local origin were equally rare. Apparently, these imposing edifices

68  Culture History

were kept admirably clean. What was learned of external relations, therefore, came primarily from artifacts unearthed during excavations at sites found on survey. Here, minuscule numbers of sherds from imported pottery vessels were recovered, mostly elaborately painted cylinder vases that may have originally come from the nearby Comayagua Valley and the Caribbean coast. More common goods of foreign derivation were obsidian blades. Obsidian is a volcanic glass highly prized in Mesoamerica for fashioning cutting tools. At the time, the closest known source for these implements was about 200 km to the southwest, at the Ixtepeque flows in eastern Guatemala. These deposits are located close to the Maya center of Copán whose rulers are thought to have controlled its distribution in Southeast Mesoamerica. Somehow, even the humblest Late Classic householder in the Naco Valley had access to these imported stone tools. Unanticipated developments led to changes in the research strategy. All of these modifications were made within the context of the overarching theory described earlier and were geared to accomplishing objectives defined as important from the outset of investigations. Reconstructing the valley’s chronology, determining the distribution of ancient settlements, and inferring the range and nature of external connections were still central to John and Pat’s studies. They just had to change how these topics were addressed. By the conclusion of the 1979 field season, approximately 50 percent of the valley floor had been surveyed, 19 of the 135 recorded sites excavated, and 46,401 artifacts analyzed. Six structures at La Sierra had been dug, five of which were large platforms in the monumental site core, and deep probes had been sunk to reconstruct the local temporal sequence. About two-thirds of what was thought to be La Sierra’s full extent was mapped. All of what remained of the Late Postclassic site of Naco was recorded by Tony Wonderley, who dug there in 1977 and 1979.

Interpretations The data were skewed and Pat knew it. Most of the information gathered between 1974 and 1979 came from survey and excavations conducted in areas outside La Sierra. Nevertheless, what was found so nicely matched expectations that she simply noted the biases and embraced the results. The chronology was long, stretching from the Middle Preclassic (800–400 BC was our best guess for its dates as of 1979) through to the Spanish Conquest. The Late Classic (AD 600–900, its temporal definition at the time) and Late Postclassic intervals were identified as periods of maximum political complexity. During both spans, nobles living at sizable capitals (La Sierra in the Late Classic and the site of Naco during the Late Postclassic) at the peaks of their respective site hierarchies ruled the entire valley. The Late Classic also witnessed a marked growth in population. The numbers of people living in the basin exceeded those reached in earlier and later periods. This interpretation was based on those excavations conducted at sites found during survey. In other

Culture History  69

periods, the Naco Valley was apparently divided among small political units, the capitals of which paled in comparison with their Late Classic and Late Postclassic counterparts. These results seemingly confirmed Pat’s original hypothesis that the patterns of population and political change seen in the lowland Maya zone were replicated on a small scale in the Naco Valley. This correlation made perfect sense, based on the fundamental assumption that Naco Valley developments would be inspired by influences emanating from the Maya lowlands. Similarities in the layout of the La Sierra and Copán ballcourts seemed to corroborate the notion that lowland Maya rulers provided models that catalyzed changes observed in the Naco Valley. Further confirming the guiding assumptions was the impression that La Sierra was only a modest political center, its rulers exercising relatively little control over their subordinates. The mapped portions of La Sierra suggested that even though the site was large by local standards, it was far smaller than any known lowland Maya capital. Along the same lines, the 56 rural Naco sites dated to the Late Classic comprised a sizable proportion of the total number of settlements found during survey (43 percent) but did not suggest a population that was large in any absolute sense. No evidence of craft production was identified in any of these early excavations. It was hard to escape the impression, therefore, that pretty much everyone in the Late Classic Naco Valley engaged in the same round of productive tasks, feeding themselves and fashioning the few items they needed. Survey indicated that all sites, including those pertaining to the Late Classic, were situated close to essential assets such as fertile soils, building stones, and year-round sources of water. Such a distribution suggested that each domestic group or extended family, no matter how small, met most of its own physical needs by its own efforts. La Sierra’s rulers were able to extract modest food surpluses and labor from these people. After all, someone had built the large platforms that made up the capital’s site core. The size and frequency of these demands were almost certainly limited by the economic autonomy of followers. Pat thought that the basis of Late Classic elite power, such as it was, derived from the association of rulers with distant Maya realms, especially Copán, and the goods they obtained from these contacts, such as imported pottery and obsidian. These valuable imports were, based on the excavations pursued at rural settlements, handed around to supporters throughout the valley as gifts (or bribes) to ensure their loyalty. Very few imports, however, appeared in excavated and surface collections. The paucity of these valuables implied that their presumed distribution from La Sierra was a thin thread with which to bind followers to leaders. The preponderance of ritual structures in the La Sierra site core—for example, the ballcourt—now suggested that the preeminence of rulers was founded primarily on ceremonies they performed for all valley residents, possibly as intercessors with the supernatural. That the ballcourt was seemingly based on a Copán model implied to our willing eyes that these elite rites were of Maya inspiration.

70  Culture History

The above hypothesis of an economically self-sufficient peasantry ruled by those who controlled access to the supernatural and scant foreign valuables fit well with interpretations then current of Late Classic lowland Maya political organization. The primary difference is that the realm centered on La Sierra was far smaller than the prototypes on which it was presumably modeled. In short, the various pieces of evidence available from survey, excavation, and artifact analyses could all be interpreted (and amplified) by making inferences to the best explanation based on the principles of culture history. All the data was accounted for in ways that made sense according to the widely shared principles of this school. That said, Pat was taken aback by how little evidence there was for external connections in all periods save the Late Postclassic. During the Late Classic population and political peak, interactions with neighboring regions were signaled by three things: The La Sierra ballcourt; the small amounts of obsidian found at all excavated settlements, including La Sierra; and a handful of sherds from elaborately painted polychrome vessels of diverse origins. None of these containers came directly from Copán. In addition, the distinctive caches (ritual deposits), burials, monuments, and hieroglyphic inscriptions that characterized lowland Maya capitals were not found at La Sierra. The arrangement of large buildings here also did not replicate the organization of temples and palaces seen at lowland Maya political centers. This should have signaled that something was wrong with her interpretations. If Copán loomed so large in La Sierra’s history, why were so few items and material patterns traceable to that center? Her inference to the best explanation accounted for most of the data but failed to accommodate materials that should have been there but were not. Happily ignoring that discordant note, however, she supposed that La Sierra and its realm were simply located on the margins of interaction networks. The Late Classic Naco Valley, therefore, was coming across as a “backwater,” despite its position on a seemingly important communication corridor following the Chamelecon River. In fact, a colleague politely described the basin as a “fascinating case of inner marginalism,” a periphery’s periphery, as it were. Pat had not expected this degree of isolation and was at a loss to explain it. Looking back, we both should have realized that these findings contradicted our shared presumption that Late Classic Naco Valley developments were inspired by lowland Maya influences. Evidence for these influences was surprisingly slight, implying that local cultural patterns owed little to external stimuli. Still, the theory she used led her to attribute exaggerated importance to the few signs of lowland Maya contacts that were recorded (that ballcourt again), and to downplay the considerable evidence that such interactions were neither regular nor intense. We saw a similar phenomenon in our discussion of the great importance attributed to the carvings of supposed Mycenaean style found at Stonehenge (Chapter 13). No evidence is more important than that which you expect to find.

Culture History  71

The Naco Valley held few intellectual charms for us after 1979, and we moved off to study along the middle Ulua River drainage roughly 45 km to the south. This area seemed to be linked more directly to Copán by a series of valleys and passes than was the Naco Valley. If Copán’s monarchs were not receiving a warm welcome in the Naco Valley, perhaps the network linking them to other portions of Southeast Mesoamerica ran along the Ulua, not the Chamelecon, River. We were still trying to understand how the actions of lowland Maya notables affected developments among less complexly organized, smaller neighboring societies. The Naco Valley did not offer much hope for pursuing this topic, so we went in search of a more promising locale. We did not return to the Naco Valley until 1988, and then our intention was to tie up a few loose ends. Instead, we managed to ensnare ourselves in a Gordian knot that we have yet to unravel.

The Naco Valley, AD 825—As We Saw it in the Early 1980s Based on what we knew about the Late Classic Naco Valley in 1979, we saw the area as an essentially peaceful place far removed from the hustle and bustle associated with centers such as Copán and Quiriguá. People lived in households scattered across the basin, their members going out each day to tend their fields, get wood for their fires, do some hunting and collecting of wild foods, and secure water. Most essential tools were made from time to time by the residents of individual domestic units, people fabricating just enough to meet their needs and those of their families. The daily routine was occasionally broken by attendance at ceremonies conducted at La Sierra. Life in the capital differed little from that in the countryside, except that it was conducted on a slightly larger scale. Rulers and their families were fed from surpluses surrendered by valley farmers, in return for which notables interceded with the supernatural through rituals celebrated near their large residences in the site core. Subordinates also occasionally contributed their labor to construction projects at La Sierra. These efforts were probably widely spaced in time and never involved more than a few hundred or so laborers at any one moment. Valley leaders carefully avoided imposing demands for food and work that their followers would think excessive. Surpassing those limits could lead to a withdrawal of loyalty and support. If that happened, potentates might complain but they could do little to change the situation. Visitors from afar came through the valley, bringing such exotic goods as obsidian blades and painted pottery as gifts for the rulers. The few imports acquired in this way were used by elites who passed some down to subordinates as gifts used to win and hold their loyalty. The flow of foreign goods into the valley and down the hierarchy was no more than a trickle. Travelers may have been treated politely, but any requests they may have made to establish more intensive trading relations with the locals probably fell on deaf

72  Culture History

ears. Nonetheless, ideas brought by these peripatetic aristocrats might have inspired local elites to emulate their visitors. Perhaps they heard about the ball game, or saw one performed during a visit to Copán. These enactments of cosmological principles could have intrigued La Sierra’s leaders. In them they possibly saw a way to use this ritual to burnish their charisma through their association with lowland Maya potentates. Such modeling of their behaviors on those of their visitors possibly did serve to elevate the basin’s rulers over their subordinates, strengthening their right to rule. Nonetheless, that power was limited in its scope and did not result in converting La Sierra into a capital that was comparable in size and appearance to that raised at Copán. Throughout the Late Classic, the Naco Valley was known by outsiders as a place whose residents preferred to be left alone, a place where innovation was frowned upon and tradition valued, a place that was, from the perspective of lowland Maya nobles, a bit boring.

4 Processualism

By the 1950s, processual archaeologists, led by scholars such as Lewis ­Binford in the United States and David Clarke (see Boxes 4.1 and 4.2) in Britain, were roundly criticizing the descriptive approach of their culture history colleagues who saw cultural development as particularistic, or unique to a group. The novelty of the processualist perspective (formerly called new archaeology) lay in its rigorous approach to building theory with the goal of explaining why events occurred as they did. This overt concern with developing theory significantly changed the course of archaeological research. Though processual archaeology was, and is, a fairly big tent, its basic premises are materialist, etic, and generalizing, and include an emphasis on structure over agency. In line with materialist thought, processualists argued Box 4.1  Lewis Binford Lewis Binford was one of the founding figures in processualism. Beginning in 1962, he wrote a number of highly influential articles and books that helped define the basic premises of what came to be called the “New Archaeology.” This approach stressed an explicit concern with theory, rigorous testing of ideas about the past against empirical data, and the search for general principles that could be used to explain human behavior. Binford went on to play a major role in developing and refining methods in ethnoarchaeology. He eventually conducted fieldwork in Alaska, Australia, and Africa among living hunters and gatherers to gain a better sense of the relations among certain behaviors and the material patterns that resulted from them. This research in ­middle-range theory was designed to facilitate the systematic testing of hypotheses about past actions, especially those engaged in by our earliest ancestors. Overall, Lewis Binford certainly deserves the encomium bestowed on him in the journal Scientific American as “quite possibly the most influential archaeologist of his generation.”

74  Processualism Box 4.2  David Clarke British archaeologist David Clarke was among the most theoretically sophisticated of the processual archaeologists working in the 1960s and 1970s. His volume, Analytical Archaeology (1968), is perhaps the most thoroughgoing review of archaeological theory ever produced by a member of that school. In this and his subsequent writings, Clarke synthesized insights from systems theory with calls for rigorous hypothesis testing through the application of quantitative methods. He also urged archaeologists to pursue a scientific, or generalizing, approach to the study of the past. Part of what distinguishes Clarke from some of his most prominent contemporaries was his flexible approach to the structure of archaeological explanation. By the early 1970s he had rejected then-popular efforts to model archaeological theory building on models derived from the natural sciences in favor of attempts better suited to dealing with the uncertainties of archaeological data. Especially important in this regard, he argued, is our reliance on samples of material remains, the representativeness of which is uncertain, to infer the behaviors that generated the patterns observed among recovered artifacts and features. His article, “Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence” (1973), written near the end of his tragically short life, conveys Clarke’s appreciation for the unique challenges archaeologists confront in attempting to describe and explain past events and processes. The levels of archaeological theory he presciently identified in this work are still foci of attention in archaeology theory construction today.

that human behavior in all times and places functions to promote the physical survival of a culture’s members. This need is clear to the outside observer (an etic view), though it might not have been fully evident to the people studied. Survival is ensured by members of a culture adapting effectively to their physical environment. Adaptation occurs by managing relations among technology, demography (population numbers, densities, and distribution), and a host of physical factors. Some of these are soil fertility, the habits, seasonality, and productivity of local flora and fauna, and rainfall. Which of these and other ecological variables are important to a culture’s survival depends to a great degree on the technologies deployed by members of that group. The same swamp that is a source of valuable nutrients to hunters and collectors might be an obstacle to development for an industrialized society. Drawing on general systems theory, processualists argued that all parts of a culture are strongly interrelated in the adaptation process (Figure 4.1). Subsystems like those dealing with social relations, religion, and technology contributed directly and indirectly to securing essential resources from the

Processualism  75

Figure 4.1  A n example of how culture can be represented as a system of interrelated subsystems. In this drawing by Graham Clark, the double-headed arrows indicate that all aspects of a ­culture, such as food supply, social organization, and density of population, influence and shape each other. Processualist views of systems theory tended to emphasize unidirectional causation with technological/demographic/ecological variables determining the form of ­social relations and shared beliefs in a culture. Drawn after Figure 7.3 in, Trigger, B. (2006) A History of ­Archaeological Thought. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

environment, transforming them to human use, and distributing these assets to all members of a culture. These relations created a unified adaptive mechanism that gave each culture a coherent structure. Viewing cultures as adaptive system has three corollaries: no aspect of human behavior can be understood in isolation from everything to which it is related; each culture as a whole is the basic unit of adaptation; not all cultural subsystems were created equal. The overall form assumed by a cultural system is determined by relations among demography, technology, and the environment. Some systems theorists, such as Kent Flannery (see Box 4.3), pointed out that such unidirectional causality does not always hold true. Nonetheless, most processualists held true to their materialist foundation. If survival is the primary human goal, if that aim is achieved by extracting energy from the environment to meet a population’s needs through the application of its technology, then all other aspects of the cultural system had to operate in ways that promoted those adaptive processes. Social relations are structured to ensure that technology is used advantageously while the beliefs people hold are largely determined by these same adaptive processes. People, in short, do and think what is adaptive for them to do and think. It was generally argued that cultural systems tend towards equilibrium. When a culture’s ability to survive is threatened it frequently seeks to return to a balanced state through what were called “negative feedback loops.”

76  Processualism Box 4.3  Kent Flannery Kent Flannery was in the vanguard of those researchers who established the foundations of processualism. He was always distinguished, however, by his healthy skepticism of the claims made by some processualists that archaeology’s primary goal was to identify general laws by which specific past events could be explained. Instead, Flannery pioneered the application of systems theory precepts to the study of the past. In several highly influential papers he argued that causality rarely travels in a straight, untroubled line from one set of processes (such as adaptation to the environment) to others (such as the organization of society). Rather, each culture is composed of subsystems, such as economics, politics, and religion. These components, in turn, are connected to, and influence, each other. Hence, a shift in, say, political relations can feedback on, and lead to changes in, such aspects of behavior as farming techniques and ritual practices. These transformations might under certain conditions, encourage other shifts throughout a culture and the physical environment to which its members are adapting. Understanding any example of culture change, therefore, requires gathering data that would allow the investigator to reconstruct this series of feedback loops. Flannery’s research prescription had the positive effect of pushing archaeologists to gather data relating to a wide range of variables in their studies, to take all aspects of a culture seriously, and to not write off some as causally insignificant. The system perspective also encouraged us to be alert to the complexity of past cultures and the danger of explaining them by reference to simplistic chains of direct causation.

These describe relations among subsystems that interact in ways that damp down processes of change. A favored analogy for how cultural systems worked was a thermostat. When a room’s temperature falls a thermostat detects that change, directing the furnace to supply more heat. When the room reaches the preset temperature the thermostat shuts off as the space has returned to a desired state. If cultures naturally seek equilibrium, how are they transformed? Turning back to systems theory, change was understood as a result of positive feedback relations among a system’s subsystems. In this process, shifts in the composition of one subsystem amplified changes in all others until the entire system reestablished a new equilibrium in a transformed state. As materialists, processualists argued that such changes were initiated in those aspects of a culture most closely tied to promoting adaptation, the technology– demography–environment nexus. Shifts in these variables would, in turn,

Processualism  77

initiate modifications in social, political, and belief subsystems to ensure that these beliefs and practices supported the adequate functioning of the new adaptive package. It was hard to imagine from a processualist viewpoint how significant changes would arise within a culture. If, as processualists argued, all aspects of a culture are shaped by adaptive processes, and if they are serving their purposes in promoting a culture’s survival, then why would people change them? Significant transformations, therefore, must be responses to threats to a culture’s survival that originate beyond its borders. Alternatively, they could arise as the result of the unintended consequences of actions initiated within a culture. In either case, the crucial point is that system-wide culture change occurred when the balance among aspects of technology, demography, and the environment was upset. These disturbances comprised adaptive crises to which a culture as a whole had to adjust if it was to persevere. Processualists, therefore, carried forward the culture historical view that people do not creatively seek novelty by experimenting with new cultural forms. All of us are happiest when keeping things as they are, changing our beliefs and practices only when moved to do so by some challenge. The population pressure hypothesis for domestication outlined in Chapter 1 is based on processual principles. In this case the technology–­demography– environment balance has been upset by growing populations. This challenge is met by the development of a new technology (domestication) which is explained by arguing that it was designed to promote the continued survival of growing populations within a physical setting where natural resources could not keep pace with the rapidly increasing numbers of people. Cultivating crops and herding animals, therefore, are accounted for by demonstrating their presumed function of providing more food to sustain more people under changing circumstances. Whether those cultivators and herders were aware of this relationship or not is irrelevant to the explanation. As in most processual hypotheses, the adaptive consequences of a behavior are crucial in ­understanding its cause. What those who engage in that behavior may think about it is secondary to formulating an explanation. This is because processualists assumed that we are driven to act by forces beyond our control and of which we may not be conscious. All aspects of culture form and change, therefore, are shaped by how people use technology to adjust to those features of their physical environments that have a direct impact on their lives (this approach was sometimes called techno-environmental determinism). Since there are a limited number of environments, and only so many ways people can adapt to them, processualists expect that there will be general similarities in the forms cultures take and in the adaptive processes by which those forms are achieved. Identifying and explaining such broad patterns are the ultimate goals of a processual archaeology. Processualists were, in this sense, seeking to make archaeology a science by formulating generalizations about how and why cultures take certain forms and change in particular ways under certain conditions.

78  Processualism

Initially there was a strong evolutionary component to processual a­ rchaeology. It was thought that cultures tended, in general, to change in the direction of growing population sizes and levels of complexity. The variable “complexity” was measured, first, by an ever-increasing number of cultural institutions, and second, by the arrangement of people into ever-clearer hierarchies. This trend was codified in several influential typologies (categorizations) that grouped cultures based on their supposed stage of evolutionary development. For example, foragers and hunters living in small, egalitarian mobile groups, regardless of their geographic location or time period, were classed together. They were thought to represent a form of organization that predated sedentary, hierarchically ranked societies whose economies were founded on the domestication of plants and animals. Though the shift from small to large, simple to complex, was not seen as inevitable, or as “better,” it was treated as a pervasive pattern in human history. This regularity was driven, like all aspects of culture, by processes of adaptation. Evolutionary strains are still variably evident in the work of processualists. The need to adapt is thus part of the structure that controls human actions, channeling behavior in ways that promote physical survival. Explanation is achieved in this school of thought by identifying how an artifact or behavior functions in promoting adaptation to the environment. Culture changes happen when major shifts occur in technology, population numbers and densities, and/or the environments to which people are adapting, requiring transformations in social forms, political arrangements, and beliefs. Some aspects of a normative view of culture persisted from culture history to processualism. For processualists, everyone cooperates in the common project of survival. Unlike Culture Historians, however, processualists view culture not as a product of unintentional historical processes. Instead they see it as a package of tightly integrated behaviors shaped by adaptive necessity. In the process, processualists bring the environment firmly within the cultural realm and give it an active role in shaping culture. In doing so, they adopt a reductionist view of culture, one in which explanations of human behavior focus on the interplay of cultural and non-cultural factors. This is not environmental determinism. Instead, it is creative interactions among technology, demography, and features of the local physical setting which change both culture and environment. History is also seen in a new light. Processualists do not believe that cultures change due to unpredictable events. Instead, a culture’s history is characterized by the gradual unfolding of adaptive processes which follow a logic and set of principles that are both knowable and widely applicable across different world areas and time periods. For this reason, generalizing about patterns of culture change is not only possible, but one of the central goals of a scientific archaeology. Material culture tends to be understood by processualists from a utilitarian perspective. If adaptation is the principal causative process operating to shape cultural forms and histories, then it is especially important to

Processualism  79

understand how recovered artifacts and features were used to promote survival. Processualists do not ignore stylistic variation. Such features are still crucial to writing chronologies and defining the boundaries of archaeological cultures, which remain basic units of analysis. Now, however, specifying the functions of recovered finds is seen as central to understanding how these items were employed in adaptive processes. As noted, many processualists argued that archaeology is a science. In the strongest version of this idea, some archaeologists stated that the discipline should model itself on the natural sciences, particularly physics, and strive to develop general laws of behavior much like, say, the Law of Thermodynamics. In addition, some researchers insisted that the only valid way of doing archaeology was to follow a strictly hypothetico-deductive method (see Box 4.4). Without the jargon, this means that all research should be guided by hypotheses deduced from an explicit body of theory or a general law. These laws are truth claims about a phenomenon that apply broadly under certain specified circumstances. Hypotheses would be rigorously tested, and either confirmed or rejected. As many critics have pointed out, archaeology is an historical science—think geology—a field science—like ecology—and a social science—like anthropology. While strictly deductive hypotheses based on well-laid-out, overarching, laws exist in geology and ecology, often it is not possible to design experiments to test those ideas rigorously. Rather, acceptance or rejection of hypotheses is based on field observations in an uncontrolled situation, a feature geology and ecology share with archaeology. Furthermore, in the social sciences broadly applicable laws are nonexistent or so general as to be fairly uninteresting. Box 4.4  Hypothetico-Deductive Method This mode of explanation is based on an approach to reasoning called logical positivism. In it a statement is true if its underlying premise is valid. Within this form of explanation you test the validity of general statements (or laws) by evaluating the logical consequences that follow from them (phrased as hypotheses). For example: All cats are white (a law); Joyce’s pet is a cat; Joyce’s pet must be white (a hypothesis) In this case you can have a valid deductive argument but a possibly false conclusion because the initial premise is flawed. Notice also how this form of explanation differs from inference to the best explanation. In the hypothetico-deductive method you start with a general truth claim (a law) that you then evaluate by deducing other statements

80  Processualism (hypotheses) that should be true if the law they follow from is valid. Disproving the hypotheses challenges the law’s validity, at least in the case you are considering. In inference to the best explanation you begin with a set of observations whose patterning you explain by drawing on principles derived from a body of theory. The latter is an inductive approach in which you work up from data to interpretation. In hypothetico-deductive explanations you work deductively down from generalizations to explain specific observations. Both involve hypothesis testing, insisting that statements about the world must be evaluated against empirical observations. A major difference between these forms of explanation is that one presupposes the existence of general laws while the other does not.

With time, it became clearer that strictly deducing hypotheses from laws was not necessarily the way any scientist operated. Instead, hypotheses were often developed inductively, by looking at and trying to make sense of a large body of data. Sometimes it is not clear at first where exactly hypotheses come from. Nonetheless, however they are developed, in archaeology hypotheses are now routinely advanced and examined through fieldwork, used to guide the collection, analysis, and understanding of data. As we discussed in Chapter 1, the reasoning involved in these processes follows the general form of making inferences to the best explanation. Hypothesis testing has become “normal science” in the way historian of science Thomas Kuhn used the term: we are all testing something, no matter where we get the ideas to test. Not everyone, however, sees archaeology as a science, even a social science, a point to be looked at in Chapters 8–11.

Processualism and Modernism Processualism hardly arose out of thin air. It is, in many ways, an expression of a broad approach to knowledge called modernism, which was rooted in the Enlightenment and developed in opposition to romanticism. Modernists, in general, were seeking to understand basic truths about humans as biological and social beings as well as about the world we occupy. That information was to be used to create rational and fair societies. In the modernist view, earlier efforts to define such truths based on religious dogma and the political principles of monarchy had failed to yield verifiable knowledge and just societies. Modernists argued that the findings and procedures of science offered the greatest hope of understanding the world and liberating all people from want, disease, and the tyranny of unquestioned, outmoded assumptions and practices. Great accomplishments in technology and medicine, along with the identification of general principles in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology that accounted for a wide array of natural processes, seemed to confirm the power of science to achieve these goals.

Processualism  81

There is no one modernist point of view, nor was it a static position that continued unchanged during its period of prominence. From our perspective, the most important, widely shared points uniting adherents of this view are the notions that: 1) Any phenomenon in the world can be understood through judicious, rigorous observations made under a guiding scientific theory. 2) Scientific theories are largely free of political, social, and emotional content, thus providing objective lenses on reality unbiased by personal and cultural factors. 3) All phenomena are ultimately shaped by the operation of universal principles, with study directed to revealing those principles. 4) Identifying these guiding precepts would lead to explanations of what is being examined. 5) The knowledge gained through such investigations can be used to reform society on more rational and efficient bases, thereby eradicating the prejudices, poverty, and ailments (social and physical) plaguing all nations. 6) Science is a way of discovering the truth about life and nature, and on such truth further knowledge and enlightened social policy can be founded. This very optimistic view of science and its implications infused processualism. Archaeologists, it was hoped, could contribute to the modernist agenda by identifying long-term and widely applicable processes of culture change. Knowledge of these processes could help predict the futures of current societies, enabling policy makers to define procedures for lessening the negative impacts of upcoming transformations.

Methods Developed by Processualists We cannot cover all of the methods developed by processualists as they pursued their investigations. There are suggested readings at the end of the book, for those who wish to find works covering these techniques. What we do want to draw your attention to is the close relationship between methods and theories. The latter raises novel questions that the former are developed to answer. To highlight this point we will look at several examples. Processualists recognized that people often have different roles to play in adapting their cultures to the environment, roles enacted in different places spread across the landscape. Consequently, research has to be conducted at a variety of different locales, from major political capitals to the humblest hamlets, to capture the diverse ways people in the past interacted with one another and with their environments in the process of adaptation. This concern with capturing the range of behavioral variation within cultures gave rise to studies of settlement patterns. In these, archaeologists set out to describe, through systematic survey and excavation, the full array of adaptive

82  Processualism

activities pursued at different sites within a specific area that was occupied, or at least used, by members of a culture. Recognition of behavioral variation within and across sites helped focus attention on issues of sampling. In particular, processualists ask how could anyone be certain that settlement studies had captured the complete range of activities conducted by members of a culture scattered over multiple sites? Archaeologists have always used samples of sites, excavated materials, and the like to make statements about life within a specific culture at a particular time. The materials we find are but a subset of a past culture’s total material inventory. We are inevitably in the position of extrapolating what people did in the past based on our study of a subset of their surviving remains. Processualists were concerned with making clear how those samples were drawn and how those extrapolations were made. They were, in short, concerned with developing methods by which to secure representative samples (see Box 4.5) of a culture’s past material inventory, collections of material that encompassed as much of the range of ancient behavioral variation as possible. Such an interest in sampling came about because archaeologists recognized that behavioral diversity exists in any culture. Noticing and working with diversity marks a major shift from the strong normative position of culture history in which information derived from one site could be used to typify behaviors conducted throughout an entire culture.

Box 4.5  Representative Sample A representative sample consists of a set of observations that capture the full range of variation within a population. In a representative sample, the small number of observations you make can be used to make reliable generalizations about the larger group from which that sample was drawn. For example, you may want to know what dog breeds are present, and in what proportions they appear, at an animal shelter. Unable to count every dog in the facility, you look at a small segment of all the dogs present and extrapolate from those observations to the composition of the shelter’s population. Say the 99 dogs being sheltered during your visit are divided equally among boxers, poodles, and pugs. If you draw a sample of 33 dogs to count and, there are 11 animals of each breed in that collection, then your sample is representative of the facility’s entire population. If, however, you looked at nine individuals of which 5 were boxers and 4 were pugs, your sample would be skewed. Any inferences you made concerning how many dogs of different breeds were living at the shelter would over-­estimate the numbers of these two breeds while missing the poodles entirely. It is clear that anyone who has to look at part of a population of interest and then generalize to the composition and character of the whole

Processualism  83 wants to base that interpretive leap on a representative sample. Polls of all sorts are useless unless those who run them can make a reasonable claim that the answers they provide to questions such as, “Who will you vote for?” are representative of the population likely to vote in the next election. There are many ways to collect a representative sample. Each of them seeks to reduce bias in selecting parts of a population to examine while choosing those segments to study in ways that take account of relevant vectors of variation. In conducting an opinion poll, variables of age, gender, and education level may well be significant in affecting how people vote. If this is the case, then a pollster will want to be sure to draw respondents from categories defined by the intersection of these factors in proportion to that category’s presence in the population of likely voters. Failure to take these differences into account will likely result in a skewed sample from which no reliable results can be extrapolated

Artifact typologies were also modified to answer novel questions. Categorizing materials according to their stylistic attributes continued. Processualists were still using these methods to define the boundaries of cultures and phases in their histories. Stylistic analyses were now supplemented by functional assessments of artifacts which categorized objects according to how they were used. This interest is based on the processualist premise that the primary importance of any object is the role it played in promoting adaptation. An item’s function in those adaptive behaviors now became the most important component of its significance. Categorizing artifacts by function often involved different forms of analogy as archaeologists sought to specify which variables identified on different classes of artifacts most clearly reflected how an item was employed in distinct tasks. For example, archaeologists were able to link particular patterns of microscopically visible striations on stone tools to how they were used in antiquity. They did so by making copies of those tools and then using them in such activities as cutting meat, scraping hides, and whittling wood. These experiments provided a strong basis for analogies that linked specific arrangements of scratches on ancient tools with the ways in which they were employed in adapting people to their environment. How ceramics were viewed also changed with processualism. Attention centered increasingly on those aspects of pottery that analogy suggested were most clearly tied to how a container was used. Such attributes included vessel form (different shapes were created to serve distinct, if overlapping, functions) and those features of a pot that resulted from actions directly related to the tasks in which it was employed. For example, we now expanded our type–variety classification system to include information on vessel form, sizes (where we could measure them), and marks that resulted from their use. Thus, practices of stirring food within orange-slipped bowls were inferred from

84  Processualism

distinctive patterns of wear that eroded that slip from vessel interiors. Similarly, evidence of cooking was identified by distinctive traces of burning on the exteriors of certain containers. Recording these modes allowed us to infer practices of food preparation that were important to local adaptations. They would have been missed if we had focused exclusively on stylistic variables. There were many other methods developed by processualists. Like those designed to gather floral and faunal remains that provided information on past environments and how people adjusted to them, these techniques arose from the need to answer questions about ancient adaptive processes that processualists were asking. Once these and other methods were in place, however, they were adopted by people who subscribed to other schools of thought. A culture historian, for example, need not give a causative role to adaptation to appreciate the value of environmental data in enriching their understanding of a culture’s unique history and distinctive relations to its physical setting.

Summary of Processualist Principles Like modernists in general, processualists reject studies of local particularities in favor of broad generalizations concerning human behavior. Each culture’s history is different to some extent, but all are shaped by overarching processes operating everywhere in similar fashions. Like culture historians, processualists believe that human behavior now and in the past is driven by forces beyond the understanding and control of most individuals. These causative variables, however, are not the products of purely cultural forces, such as diffusion, but arise from the creative interplay among technology, demography, and the physical environment in the process of adaptation. These materialistic principles are still constraining and directing human behavior today. By studying their operation in the past, we can understand modern adaptive dilemmas better and make informed decisions about how to solve such problems. In this way, knowledge derived from archaeology can contribute to a safer and saner future for all humanity. Whatever critiques might be leveled against processualists, at the very least they made theory development and testing explicit concerns. They also alerted us to the creative relations between culture and environment as well as to behavioral variation within cultures. From these concerns, processualists developed very valuable methods for measuring behavioral and environmental variables, including settlement survey and various techniques for recovering data relevant to reconstructing ancient environments and diets. Processualists continue to refine their theory and methods today, and their field techniques are widely used by members of diverse schools.

Naco Valley Research and the Processual Paradigm In Chapter 3 we pointed out that Pat was influenced both by culture history and processualism. The latter had been growing in importance since before her undergraduate studies began. We will begin this section with a short review of how she used processual ideas to shape fieldwork in the 1970s, then

Processualism  85

move on to how this approach influenced research in the basin that was conducted from 1988 through 1996. Since Pat was interested in settlement patterns, she had to do survey work to locate sites, as was described in Chapter 3. Before resorting to an opportunistic design, however, she attempted an approach to survey based on her readings of sampling in both archaeology and geography. The design was intended to eliminate bias in the choice of territory to be examined and to cover an amount of space adequate to provide information from which site sizes and placements throughout the valley could be extrapolated (see Box 4.6). It was a disaster for all the reasons described in Box 4.6. In this case, processualism lost to culture history.

Box 4.6  Naco Valley Survey Design Pat originally planned to choose where to survey in the Naco Valley using an approach called “stratified random sampling.” Briefly, this strategy attempts to reduce user bias in choosing where to look for sites while enhancing the chance that the full range of ancient settlements surviving in an area is observed in proportions that reflect their original frequencies. Pat sought to achieve this aim by: •

•

•

Dividing the Naco valley among areas (the “strata” of the title) each characterized by environmental factors that the original inhabitants likely took into account in choosing where to live and pursue the tasks they needed to survive (these variables included access to year-round water sources, soils with differing characteristics, including fertility, and stones used in construction). Randomly (in a statistical, not a gay abandon, sense) selecting areas to survey from within each of these zones on the assumption that sites of different ages, functions, and sizes were to be found in different environmental zones; The amount of area investigated in each zone would be proportional to the portion of the entire valley that microenvironment encompassed.

The problems that arose with implementing this design in the 1970s included: difficulties in finding the sampling units on the ground without the aid of portable GPS devices and by using maps that were two decades out of date by that time; the challenge of recognizing sites in dense thorn scrub, which for some reason always seemed to cover the sampled area; the frustration of seeing sites in cleared fields that could not be recorded because they did not fall within the sample area (and recording them would violate the principles of stratified random sampling).

86  Processualism

Pat did not record sites as though they were all the same. Instead, she followed the lead of processualists and categorized the settlements she found into a site hierarchy (see Box 4.7). This division of sites by size presupposes that the number of levels in a hierarchy corresponded to the nature and complexity of a culture’s socio-political organization. Pat’s hierarchy served two purposes: it helped determine the range of sites to excavate; and later, was used to infer political changes over time. The excavated sample was also chosen with respect to location and information about soils and farming productivity. She took notes on the soils found around each recorded site and talked to local farmers about how many plantings were possible in each per year, and how productive the plantings were. Pat did not do chemical testing nor detailed soil descriptions at this time—those came in the 1980s and 1990s. Finally, she tried to excavate a site near each of the major rock outcrops that seemed to have been sources of construction materials, schist in the center of the valley and limestone on the east margin. Pat was, in short, dividing the identified sites into categories based on the intersection of settlement size and access to environmental resources. Why go through this trouble? Inspired by processualist ideas, Pat was intent on capturing as wide an array as possible of the behavioral variation that characterized the valley during any one phase and over time. She could not know ahead of time what activities occurred at which sites. It seemed likely,

Box 4.7  Settlement and Sociopolitical Evolution The evolutionary stages with which some Processualists divided the continuum of sociopolitical complexity were associated with different forms of site hierarchies. Egalitarian societies, in which power was widely diffused and hierarchies unstable or non-existent, were recognized in settlement patterns composed of sites that were all roughly the same size and lacked monumental constructions. The appearance of rudimentary hierarchies and some concentration of power in a few hands was signified by site hierarchies composed of two levels. The sole site in the upper tier was larger than all other contemporary settlements and contained the only examples of monumental architecture in the culture. More complex sociopolitical formations, characterized by elaborate hierarchies and the concentration of considerable power in very few hands, were recognized in settlement hierarches composed of three or more tiers. In these systems rulers exercised control over sizable populations from large capitals dominated by massive constructions and through subordinate elites residing at smaller centers with some, but more modest, public buildings. Most sites in the system were small and had no monumental architecture

Processualism  87

however, that what people living in large sites on fertile soils, near good sources of building stones during the Late Classic did might well be different from what was going on during that period in small settlements situated on relatively infertile terrain distant from suitable construction material. Because describing these differences would be crucial to understanding how ancient Naco Valley residents lived and adapted to their environment, Pat was intent on creating a design for choosing where to excavate that would capture some of that likely variety among ancient actions. Using the ceramic chronology, the excavated and few surface materials could be assigned to one of the six phases then defined for the basin. In doing this, Pat saw that certain site plans corresponded to specific time periods. Based on this correlation between site forms and phases, Pat inferred dates of occupation for at least some unexcavated sites in the valley. These extrapolations increased the number of sites that could be assigned to each temporal unit. Chronological placements were not always hard and fast. Pat had several levels of confidence in a site’s date, from definite, through probable, to possible, and ending with unknown. The most populous phase based on these analyses was Late Classic Periods 6A and 6B (Figure 2.2 is an example of a settlement map), with slowly increasing numbers of inhabitants prior to that, and a rapid decrease after Period 6B. Once sites were assigned to phases, Pat could look at how settlement had changed through time. She wanted to move beyond describing basic population shifts to modeling ancient social and political structures. In doing so she turned to economic geography, especially how archaeologists were using its ideas. She first tried nearest neighbor analysis, an approach to identifying site clusters during a specific era based on the distances between settlements, no matter what their sizes. These clusters might reflect ancient social groups that existed above the level of the site but below that of the entire valley. This approach did not work because, first, the valley was much smaller than the areas in which this technique had been employed by geographers and archaeologists. Second, there were not enough sites in any given time period to comprise a robust enough sample for recognizing settlement clusters. She also tried techniques based on models derived from central place theory (see Box 4.8) to define the limits of political units within the valley. She concluded that, again, this technique could not yield meaningful results because the valley was too small, the number of sites too few, and the assumptions on which central place theory was based, such as a uniform, flat plain, were not met. After some false starts Pat, assuming that the patterns she saw were representative of all sites to be found in the valley, settled on characterizing settlement during the Late Classic phases as an example of a primate distribution. A primate distribution describes a situation where there is one large locale— La Sierra in the Naco Valley case—below which are settlements of much smaller sizes. Each successively lower rank should have more sites than the one above it, and this was true for the Late Classic Periods 6A and 6B. The

88  Processualism Box 4.8  Central Place Theory Central place theory was developed by the German geographer Walter Christaller in the early twentieth century to explain the general forms and distribution of modern and historically known settlements. In essence, central place theorists created a model that, all else being equal, contended that settlements would be located on a landscape in ways that maximized the efficiency with which they could provide services to their hinterlands. For example, if a center (say a city) provided primarily administrative services to its population, then its subordinate settlements and their hinterlands would be included completely within the borders of that capital’s domain. It is simply more efficient to organize service provision in this way than to have subordinate towns located on a realm’s borders, drawing on the facilities provided by two or more capitals. If, on the other hand, increasing the efficiency of transporting goods among cities is imperative, then these centers will be located on roads that run directly between them in as straight a line as possible. Subordinate settlements will also be situated on these thoroughfares, each halfway between neighboring capitals. This increases the efficiency, and lowers the cost, of transporting goods along roads linking cities. This model presumes that settlements are distributed across a uniform plain. That means that there are no features on it that would encourage deviation from these efficiency-maximizing principles. A river, for example, might be a powerful attractor to settlement that would lead people in the second case to settle away from a road and near this source of reliable drinking water. One value of central place theory to archaeologists was its ability to set up ideal situations from which real-world examples invariably diverged. If, say, your study of how sites were distributed around a major political capital revealed patterns that deviated from those predicted based on the administrative principle (the first example given above) then you could look for those variables that might have contributed to this divergence. Central place theory also provided a means of drawing boundaries among competing realms based on the assumption that elites of equal power ruling from comparably sized capitals would space their centers evenly across the terrain as their competitions for territory resulted in stalemates. In this and other cases, central place theory provided one means for reading social, political, and economic information from settlement patterns.

Processualism  89

resulting site hierarchy indicated that most people lived in small, if not necessarily isolated, settlements which were ruled from the primate center. Some of that central power was likely delegated to subordinate elites living in sites that were much smaller than the capital but larger than the many hamlets in which the majority of the Late Classic population resided. The only other interval in Naco Valley prehistory characterized by a primate settlement distribution was the Late Postclassic. During this phase the site of Naco was the largest locale, all other discovered contemporary settlements being very small. The remaining phases either lacked site hierarchies or had settlement distributions that did not conform to the primate form. The former settlement pattern suggested egalitarian forms of sociopolitical organization. The latter seemed to reflect competition among leaders of small political units no one of which gained suzerainty over the others.

Processualist Influences: 1975–1979 As described in Chapter 3, Pat’s settlement analyses confirmed her hypothesis that demographic and political changes in the Naco Valley paralleled those known from the Maya lowlands in timing, if not in scale. As discussed in that chapter, these similarities were explained by reference to some form of diffusion. Developments in the lowland Maya heartland stimulated cultural transformations in its periphery. Pat’s work was not, however, solely inspired by theories based in culture history. Her recognition that different behaviors in any one phase might well be pursued at sundry sites scattered across the valley derived directly from her reading of processualists. This acknowledgement of intra-cultural behavioral variation led Pat to categorize the sites she found on survey to take account of their differing forms, sizes, and relations to physical resources that were likely important to the settlements’ residents. Limitations of time and money restricted how much of that presumed behavioral variation Pat could discern among the 19 sites she dug. Still, this interest in the spatial distribution of differing activities would remain a constant theme in our research within the Naco Valley. That focus is rooted firmly in processualism. Processualist thought also inspired Pat to attend closely to relations between people and their physical settings. As she conducted the survey, Pat became sensitive to environmental diversity within the 100 km 2 valley. What had seemed at first to be a more-or-less physically homogenous unit was revealed from 1975–1979 to be composed of a mosaic of distinct if overlapping resource zones. Each zone was characterized by differing suites of resources including soils of varying fertility, stones usable for construction, and proximity to reliable water supplies. There was little Pat could do at the time about specifying more precisely how these areas differed and the significance of those variations for ancient human adaptations. Exacerbating this problem was the fact that the Naco Valley’s soils proved relatively inimical to the preservation of floral and faunal remains. Reconstructing ancient

90  Processualism

diets, environments, and variations in both based on these sorts of data would remain a problem throughout our research in the basin. Nonetheless, Pat remained convinced that paying attention to environmental variation within the valley would be a productive line of enquiry to follow in the future. We never did so but two of our colleagues, Kirk Anderson and John Douglass, tackled these issues in their own work as part of the Naco Valley Archaeological Project.

Kirk Anderson’s Geomorphological Study During the 1992 field season, Dr. Kirk Anderson investigated landforms in the Naco Valley, described the basin’s geology, mapped variations in soil characteristics and fertility, and reconstructed processes of soil erosion and deposition that played out over 15,000 years of the basin’s past. His work was designed to accomplish several goals, the most important for our purposes here are the following. First, Kirk sought to map the distribution of resources that might have influenced settlement choices in the Naco Valley. Kirk was especially interested in how agriculturally productive soils and raw materials suitable for making tools and constructing houses were differentially distributed across the basin. If these resource distributions could be matched with known settlement locations, we could understand better the ways in which the valley’s ancient inhabitants weighed environmental considerations in making choices about where to live at different points in time. For example, some of the most stable areas in the valley, those least prone to flooding, are in upland locations where the soil is not uniformly fertile. Agriculturally productive tracts are generally, though not solely, found near the major rivers where periodic flooding can be a problem. How did the valley’s inhabitants in different periods assess these factors in choosing where to settle? Kirk’s mapping of resource zones was an invaluable contribution to the overall project as it provided crucial information on the environmental parameters within which Naco Valley populations lived for the, minimally, 2,700 years of the region’s recorded prehistory. Kirk’s investigations greatly refined Pat’s initial observations and provided stronger bases for making inferences to the best explanation about the how and why people in different phases chose to reside where they did. As noted above, these concerns with human–environment relations derive directly from processualism wherein the nature of these interactions is seen as crucial to describing and explaining past cultural forms. Second, Kirk set out to understand how environmental processes might have helped cause a significant culture change: the drastic population decline combined with the collapse of centralized political power that occurred at what we, in 1992, thought of as the end of the Late Classic. The hypothesis concerning this shift that we wanted to test was inspired by several

Processualism  91

observations that resulted from the continuing settlement survey. First, Pat’s initial research indicated that the Late Classic witnessed a dramatic rise in how many people lived in the valley. Surveys during 1988–1991 confirmed this finding. In fact, it appeared likely that equivalent population numbers were not matched in the basin until the middle of the twentieth century (based on the numbers and sizes of sites found in the basin from the Late Classic through Historic periods). Second, as a result of this demographic spike, people were apparently forced during the Late Classic onto marginal land up against the surrounding mountains. Third, the Late Classic was followed by a drastic decline in site numbers and sizes during the subsequent Early Postclassic (AD 900–1300). Fourth, at about the same time, the valley’s Late Classic capital of La Sierra was seemingly abandoned. We hypothesized that these demographic and political variables were related in the following ways. Population growth led to the farming of ever-thinner, more fragile and marginally fertile soils on the basin’s surrounding slopes. As rains fell on these exposed tracts, less moisture was retained than in earlier periods when the foothills were forested. The canopy created by those trees would have deflected most of the rain from directly striking the ground while the remaining moisture was largely retained by a dense network of roots. Our view of changing vegetation was based on Pat’s dissertation work, when she observed that the combination of trees on the foothills and higher upslope did not match what was predicted by elevation, or what was seen in similar areas of western Honduras. The Naco Valley’s eastern hills were covered with pines, a tree formation typical of higher elevations. Hardwoods were rare, and the typical mixed deciduous tropical forest seemed to have been replaced by evergreens. The latter tend to invade areas denuded of mixed or hardwood formations and pines can thrive in relatively infertile soils. Going back to rainfall, the increased run-off would have resulted in more earth and water entering the streams that drained the valley. The result would have been both a loss of agricultural land on the hillslopes and an increased frequency and severity of flooding along some of the most fertile tracts adjacent to these watercourses. Consequently, ever-larger segments of crop land were being taken out of production while life in settlements, like La Sierra, near stream courses became more precarious and unpredictable. These economic strains, we hypothesized, would have contributed to social and political stresses resulting in significant portions of the population fleeing the basin while their leaders struggled, and ultimately failed, to maintain their power. We were reasoning here by inference to the best explanation. We were confronted with a set of observations that included what seemed to be: a rapid increase in site sizes and numbers during the Late Classic; the appearance of Late Classic settlements on marginal, easily eroded soils; a dramatic drop in site numbers and sizes during the Early Postclassic; the abandonment of La Sierra at this time. Drawing on processualist principles, we hypothesized that these factors were connected and that their relations could be explained by a narrative of adaptation gone wrong. Over-exploitation of

92  Processualism

fragile environments set in motion physical processes that had disastrous consequences for the continued survival of large numbers of people in the Naco Valley after AD 900. There is nothing obvious about these linkages among sites, soils, and changes in the former in relation to the latter. Processualism provides the principles that highlight these connections, in the process explaining why these variables changed as they did. As we discussed in Chapter 1, however, this account could be wrong. Kirk and his colleagues set about testing this inference in 1992. By examining buried soil horizons, dating flood episodes using samples drawn for Carbon14 testing, and looking at the relationships between natural and cultural stratigraphic sequences, they determined that the period from AD 810–900 was indeed marked by widespread flooding in the basin. The flood waters deposited up to 3 m of soil along both banks of the Rio Chamelecon. These inundations did bury some Late Classic buildings located near that river, tentatively suggesting that the residents of places like La Sierra were caught unawares by the floods’ severity and were undoubtedly not pleased by the results. As encouraging as the findings were, the outcome was not a straightforward confirmation of the original hypothesis. For one thing, the floods correlated with a world-wide period of warmer, wetter conditions. The inundations Kirk documented might, therefore, have been due to purely natural, not human-induced, processes. For another, when Kirk measured the fertility of buried soils that might well have been farmed during the Late Classic, he did not find any evidence of a decline in crucial nutrients needed to sustain crop production. Such a drop-off in fertility was predicted as a consequence of over-farming to feed the ever more numerous Late Classic populations. In short, the flooding predicted by our hypothesis did seem to have occurred at the time we expected it to have happened. However, those events may not have been caused by excessive land clearing as we had argued. Life is almost always more complicated than we like to imagine it is, or was. While the research summarized here was inspired by processualism it did not adhere to that school’s contention that human adaptations generally resulted in balanced relations among the cultural and environmental components of ancient ecologies. Processualists, however, were not blind to the fact that people were more than capable of upsetting those equilibriums. Such disruptions could have catastrophic consequences for the populations involved. For example, it has long been argued that the massive drop in populations and the abandonment of major cities that characterized the lowland Maya collapse in the tenth century AD were precipitated by human-induced damage to fragile tropical ecosystems. It was this work and that inspired our initial hypothesis about what caused similar demographic and political changes in the Late Classic Naco Valley. To bring this story up-to-date, the research we conducted with students and staff in the basin during 1995–1996 revealed that population numbers here only declined strikingly after ca. AD 1000. La Sierra also remained

Processualism  93

a large center until that date though there are strong signs that its rulers ceased being able to control the entire basin after the early ninth century CE. The floods which Kirk and his team so meticulously recorded and dated did not, therefore, coincide with the demographic collapse that occurred about a ­century after the valley’s streams overflowed their banks. It may be, however, that the fall from power of La Sierra’s rulers in the early ninth century was partly triggered by their inability to protect even that center’s inhabitants from repeated destructive floods spanning much of that century. Population declines and political shifts may, therefore, not have proceeded together

John Douglass’s Hinterland Households John Douglass, as part of his dissertation research, set out in 1996 to test several hypotheses concerning relations among the productive activities conducted in households and the fertility of the soils those domestic units occupied during the Late Classic (then defined as AD 600–900). John’s work with Late Classic households was founded on Kirk Anderson’s 1992 geomorphological investigations in the Naco Valley, in particular on his three-part classification of soils according to their differential abilities to sustain crop production. The distribution of the valley’s natural resources, which Kirk identified, that could be used in craft manufacture were also significant for John. He excavated at six Late Classic households and drew on examinations of five other contemporary small domestic groups investigated by other project members. In what ways was this work inspired by processualist principles? First, John was primarily concerned with how an environmental variable, soil fertility, could have had an impact on the decisions made by ancient householders concerning whether to take up craft manufacturing and, if so, what could they produce, at what scales and levels of intensity. For example, one of John’s hypotheses asked if households occupying different soils exhibited similar or divergent degrees of engagement in craft production. A possibility John considered within this hypothesis was that households situated on the poorest soils would engage in fashioning the widest array of crafts at the highest volumes and levels of intensity. This decision to fabricate large quantities of goods was driven, so John’s argument goes, by the need to make up for low agricultural yields. Lacking the ability to feed themselves or pay tribute with the products of their fields, households on poor soils needed to solve that problem by securing food by other means. One way would be by exchanging the outputs of their workshops with households whose members farmed more fertile tracts and thus produced crop surpluses. Alternatively, John reasoned that it was those households that were well-situated to produce agricultural surpluses who could afford to support non-farming specialists engaged in craft manufacture. Crop surpluses, in this case, would be used to subsidize those who devoted considerable amounts of their time to craft manufacture. These crafts, in turn, could be exchanged

94  Processualism

with other households for a wide array of resources that could successfully buffer the artisans against downturns in agricultural production. Processualists argued that human behavior can be successfully understood when it is shown how it functions to promote survival within certain environments. Fashioning craft goods, in John’s hypotheses, is explained by demonstrating its adaptive consequences under different soil conditions. Exactly how crafts and soils were related was what John was trying to figure out. Second, John’s research strategy also has roots in processualism. Processualists urged us to be systematic in our study of the past. One way to approach that ideal was by specifying, before entering the field, hypotheses about how crucial variables were related and what we should expect to find in our work that would support or reject those ideas. Formulating and testing hypotheses is a powerful way to focus your attention in ways that enhance the coherence of investigations and the falsifiability of their results. Going further, many processualists argued for the testing of multiple working hypotheses. By evaluating simultaneously several different propositions about the past, researchers should be less tempted to bias their findings by trying, unconsciously, to make the data they collect fit the expectations of a favored hypothesis. Bearing several conflicting interpretations in mind while conducting investigations also encourages archaeologists to remain aware that human behavior need not follow one well-worn path. John, as you can see here, followed that lead. Third, John was also following the processualist suggestion that a primary goal of any study was to explain the variation seen among and within ancient human settlements. The differences highlighted in this case were the result of how people adjusted to distinct environments (soil zones) through sundry practices (participation in varied sorts and intensities of craft production). John was clear that a household’s physical setting did not dictate the choices its members made concerning whether, and to what degrees, they would engage in craft activities. Therefore, there is no hint of environmental determinism in his hypotheses. The two working hypotheses about the possible relations between soil fertility and craft production listed earlier signal that John did not think that these connections were either obvious or simple. Fourth, a concern with describing and explaining variations in ancient behaviors meant that John shared the processualist concern with sampling. Processualists knew that some sort of compromise was required between the need to document the complete array of ancient behaviors and the virtual impossibility of doing so by digging every square meter of every recovered site. This is why they were so interested in applying statistical techniques that were designed to allow reasonable extrapolations from a few data points (such as responses to an opinion poll) to the full range of variation that characterized the research universe from which those points were drawn (e.g., what voters in the United States think about a particular issue or who they are likely to vote for in the next election).

Processualism  95

It was impossible for John, or even all the project’s investigators over the years, to dig every site dating to the Late Classic in the Naco Valley. Nonetheless, John’s goal was to secure as complete a picture as possible of the full range of crafts pursued during the Late Classic in households occupying the major soil types identified in the basin. Once any of us acknowledges the possibility that different settlements were places where ancient people took part in varied actions then we have to figure out how best to study intensely a few places and generalize from those results to what was happening throughout a culture at any point in time. John, therefore, had to draw his sample of investigated sites to include examples covering a wide array of settlement sizes, occupying all three soil classes, and situated in diverse parts of the valley, with the idea that soil type, site size and location might correlate with differences in craft engagement. We cannot do justice here to the full scale and sophistication of John’s research. In all, he assessed five major hypotheses concerning relations among crafts, soil fertility, household wealth, and political connections to La Sierra, not all of which were founded on premises of the processual approach. If you are interested in seeing how these investigations played out we strongly recommend that you read John’s book, Hinterland Households (the full reference is given in the suggested readings at the end of the book). We have described certain aspects of John’s work because they exemplify important premises of processual archaeology as that perspective was applied by a bright young professional to his research in the Naco Valley. This work also exemplifies something important about the nature of archaeological field projects: all of a project’s researchers work together to address the totality of ancient life. Kirk Anderson studied the valley’s geomorphology, providing information not just for John but for all of us. Other studies were being pursued in these years as well, ones that do not fall into the processualist category. For example, while John and Kirk were conducting their studies, other investigators were examining how elites gained and protected their power during the Late Classic. Still other investigators were examining what the designs on Late Classic pottery containers might have meant to those who made and used them. These questions will be discussed in subsequent chapters. What we would like you to consider here is the possibility that investigations conducted within the same research project may well be inspired by principles drawn from different schools of thought. Those interested in human–environment interactions can share meals, a truck, and stimulating conversations with colleagues pursuing studies motivated by culture history, Marxism, or any of a number of other perspectives. To paraphrase the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the problem with human behavior is not that there is one right way to study it but that there are so many, and we have to choose one to guide our specific investigation. We all select different paths illuminated by distinct theories to answer specific questions about the past. Our research is enriched when we combine the insights yielded by applying these varied perspectives.

96  Processualism

Looking Ahead Some of the fieldwork undertaken between 1988 and 1996 was inspired by processualist thought, just as culture history shaped other parts. In truth, however, most of this second phase of Naco investigations was not based on either school. Rather, we had internalized the methods and some of the precepts of culture history and processualism by the late 1980s and could not imagine how a project could function without drawing inspiration from those schools. Even so, we looked for hypotheses to guide our work in other bodies of ideas. These approaches were inspired by Marxist principles that highlighted: power relations within a political unit and between polities; how these relations might be seen using world systems theory; and how material goods played into power struggles occurring over varying spatial scales from within a basin to among many valleys. It is to these issues that we turn in the next chapter.

The Naco Valley in AD 825 as Seen Through a Processualist Lens How did the research projects summarized in this chapter change our views of life in the Naco Valley during the Late Classic? For one thing, Pat’s survey marked a shift away from the culture historical focus on a single large site that could be treated as typical of the culture in which it was embedded. In doing so, Pat became increasingly interested in variations among the behaviors pursued by the Naco Valley’s residents across multiple settlements and phases. As most of the sites recorded on the survey dated to the Late Classic, much of what was learned about intra-cultural differences pertained to that interval. By the end of the 1979 season, this information did not seriously challenge the culture history-inspired theories that guided the first phase of Naco Valley investigations. As described in Chapter 2, the basin’s history as inscribed in its shifting settlement patterns, closely paralleled developments recorded in the neighboring Maya lowlands. Nonetheless, we left the Naco Valley in 1979 with a growing appreciation for the importance of human–­ environment relations and the different forms these interactions could take even within a relatively small area. The seeds planted in 1975–1979 came to fruition in the valley through the work of our colleagues. Kirk Anderson’s geomorphological survey more precisely specified variations in the distribution of natural resources, including soils of differing levels of fertility, within the basin than had our earlier work. John Douglass then built on that strong foundation to assess hypotheses concerning relations among the capacities of different soil types to support crops, craft production, and the adaptive strategies employed by different domestic groups during the Late Classic. Kirk also used the data he generated to evaluate an explanation for what appeared in 1992 to be a demographic and political collapse dating in the valley to the tenth century AD.

Processualism  97

John’s research exploded the notion that the Naco Valley’s rural population was economically homogenous, all householders producing food and craft goods to meet their own needs. Rather, different residential units were engaging in complementary economic activities creating a complex system of exchange relations on which they all depended for survival. This point is addressed in Chapter 6. Kirk’s investigations undermined the seeming happy equilibrium in which we had originally imagined that the valley’s Late ­Classic population resided. The basin’s inhabitants, instead, creatively dealt with a volatile environment that precipitated unpredictable floods. Those inundations certainly buried houses and probably damaged fields. The reconstructed shifts seemingly had multiple causes and consequences, none of which were imagined in the reconstruction of Naco Valley history that Pat penned in 1979. Research inspired by processualist principles complicated what we thought we knew before those studies were carried out. This is the goal of all research and one of the reasons why, if you can, it is a good idea to conduct investigations in the same place over multiple years. These few examples also suggest that encouraging studies of the same region that are founded on different premises helps to enhance our understanding of an area’s prehistory.

5 Marxism I Trade and Power

If processualism is a big tent, Marxism is more like a civic arena. In other words, Karl Marx’s (see Box 5.1) writings have inspired a wide range of approaches to the study of human behavior. In part, these differences reflect the varied ways that concepts Marx originally developed to describe and explain capitalist political and economic relations can be reinterpreted to understand the actions of people operating under very different economic conditions. In addition, Marx’s writings encompass a protracted span over which he modified his ideas. It is possible to read these texts in many ways and that is exactly what has happened. Nonetheless, there are some unifying principles that unite Marxist approaches to archaeology.

Box 5.1  Karl Marx Karl Marx delved below the surface of capitalist economic relations in an effort to reveal the basic mechanisms by which they operated in the nineteenth century and how they arose from organizationally simpler forms. His goal was to reform Euroamerican society by exposing to all the exploitive processes on which capitalism was based. Debate continues to rage about how Marx’s texts should be read and their insights into the operation of capitalism translated into interpretations of human societies generally. Despite these arguments, Marx’s work is essential to social theory in large part because of the importance he places on social heterogeneity. Briefly, Marx stressed that people encounter reality and their culture differentially based on the positions they occupy within a society. These positions are largely defined, in Marx’s view, by a person’s socio-economic class. Each class is distinguished by the relations its members enjoy to the forces and relations of production. Simply put, the first factor refers to the knowledge and technology people bring to bear in extracting energy from the natural

Marxism I: Trade and Power  99 environment, a process that always involves mobilizing the enduring social connections through which skills and techniques are put in play. The latter interactions are the relations of production. Classes exist in antagonistic relations, their dealings usually characterized by some form of exploitation. This exploitation often involves the extraction of labor and its products from those with unfavorable access to the forces and relations of production by those who have privileged control over them. Wealth thus flows up the hierarchy to a very few and is based on the systematic impoverishment of the majority. Various researchers have questioned whether class, even in modern industrial economies, is the primary determinant of how people engage with the forces and relations of production. Factors such as gender, ethnicity, and age, alone and in conjunction with class, have been put forward as equally important in shaping social positions. Nevertheless, Marx’s original insights continue to inspire much social science research into political and economic processes as well as the varied ways power contests fragment societies.

Marxian Premises Marxian perspectives are materialistic (see Box 5.2). In its various guises, Marxism is based on the assumption that the primary goal of all ­people is achieving physical survival. This requires converting nature to ­human use, a process defined in Marxian writings as “labor.” People do not survive by their individual efforts alone. Instead, labor is always a s­ocial process involving cooperation among people working in social groups, employing technology in processes of production. The relations of ­production describe how those groups are organized. The technology, ­including tools and the knowledge needed to make and use them, are the forces of production. The forces and relations of production are inseparable. A farming technology does not produce food by itself. Instead, the tools and knowledge that constitute those forces of production must be put to use by people who organize for that purpose. The means of production, in turn, signifies the tangible inputs and facilities needed to generate items that humans need or value. The means of production vary depending on the forces of production that a human group employs to extract energy through the operation of the relations of production. For example, fertile tracts of land could comprise crucial means of production in agricultural societies, while factories are important means of production in industrial economies. The forces, relations, and means of production combine to define the mode of production. A society’s dominant mode of production is constituted by a distinct arrangement of those relations among labor, nature, technology,

100  Marxism I: Trade and Power Box 5.2  Marxian vs. Marxist There is probably no social theory that has been as deeply embroiled in political debates and open conflicts as has that body of ideas proposed by Karl Marx. As a result, describing a theory as “Marxist” carries political connotations that terms like “processualist” do not. To avoid unnecessary confusion between theories, on the one hand, and political movements, on the other, that have been inspired by Marx we will refer to the former as “Marxian” rather than “Marxist.”

social formations, and facilities through which vital resources are obtained and transformed for human use. Production is the key to our survival and adaptation is invariably a social process. It is also a political process. Processualists tend to see adaptation as involving practices that promote equilibrium and benefit everyone in a culture. Power differences in a culture are not the results of self-seeking strategies. Leaders serve all by coordinating the actions of people who each perform different tasks that contribute to a successful adaptation. Marxians reject such “functional hunkydoryism,” the notion that everything works out for the best, even if people do not live in the best of all possible worlds. They argue, instead, that the process of extracting energy from the environment invariably generates winners and losers. This inequality follows from the premise that the energy secured from a culture’s physical setting in the form of resources is needed to survive and to exercise power. Different people have access to varying quantities and qualities of resources and so exert power to differing degrees. The concept of power can be broken down into two aspects: 1) Power over is the ability to command the actions of others. 2) Power to refers to the capacity to define and achieve one’s goals. The distinction outlined here is inspired by the writings of Eric Wolf (see Box 5.3). These two forms of power exist in a tense relationship within any society and both depend for their exercise on access to resources. For example, your ability to choose to go to college requires that you control resources both tangible (such as the money to pay tuition) and conceptual (such as the knowledge of what college is and how to apply successfully for admission). Not everyone in the United States can call on these assets. The result is a hierarchy defined by differential access to essential resources needed to exercise power. That inequality, according to Marxian writers, results from how the capitalist mode of production operates. All modes of production generate inequality. This is because the mode of production is the outcome of struggles over resources conducted among factions organized by such factors as class, gender, kinship, occupation,

Marxism I: Trade and Power  101 Box 5.3  Eric Wolf Eric Wolf was a prolific and productive scholar who, throughout a career spanning the middle to late twentieth century, did much to introduce Marxian analyses into anthropology. His early research on peasant economies and cultures in the historic and modern eras contextualized these populations within political, economic, and social forces operating on national and international scales. This perspective clashed with ­established approaches to the study of culture then current in U.S. anthropology. Following Boas’s lead, these perspectives tended to treat each culture as a largely self-contained unit whose history could and should be understood in its own right. Wolf, along with colleagues such as Sidney Mintz, promulgated the view that all people, no matter how distant from “Western civilization” we imagine them to be, are deeply embedded within global economic and political processes that were prevalent for centuries before ethnographers arrived on the scene. Ignoring these connections means that we can never fully appreciate the lives we describe, how they came to assume their current forms, and how they are likely to change in the future. Drawing inspiration from Marxism, Wolf’s analyses focused on political economies, those relations among the exercise of power on the one hand and processes of production, consumption, and exchange on the other. He was especially interested in how political economies operating over varying distances and spans of time came to constitute the structures that constrained and directed, if they did not absolutely determine, human actions and the course of history. These themes are clearly synthesized in his major text, Europe and the People without History. Though published in 1982, this book remains a touchstone for those seeking to understand how the capitalist political economy has infiltrated and helped to shape all cultures since at least the fifteenth century. The central premise is that no one exists in timeless isolation outside these global historical and exploitive processes.

ethnicity, or some combination of these and other variables. For example, those seeking to exercise power over their compatriots in an agrarian society might try to stake exclusive claims to ownership of land, a crucial component of the means of production. If they succeed, they will have enshrined that monopoly in the mode of production. In doing so, their peers are converted into subordinates who will do what the monopolists demand for fear of losing access to this crucial resource. Rather than going gently into that not-so-good night, these subordinates may move to reduce their degrees of

102  Marxism I: Trade and Power

dependence on the landholders by engaging in other activities, such as craft production. If subordinates can manufacture goods for their own use and to exchange with others, they are in a position to secure some needed assets by their own means. These resources can be used to preserve at least a limited ability to exercise a modicum of power for defining and achieving their own goals. The strategy briefly outlined in this example depends on engineering new arrangements in the forces of production (the technologies needed to pursue certain crafts), relations of production (the social connections through which craft goods are made and exchanged), and means of production (places to set up workshops and any facilities needed to fashion craft goods). Once again, these arrangements come to constitute crucial elements in the mode of production. Factional competitions, like the one imagined here, produce the constellation of forces, relations, and means of production that define the mode of production. Modes of production generate the energy needed for people to survive but they are not politically neutral. In our example, factions organized for the manufacture and distribution of crafts may be able to blunt the overweening ambitions of landowning elites. Nonetheless, the latter still hold the edge in a society whose forces of production depend on agriculture. All modes of production, therefore, describe political economies characterized by enduring tensions among factions that are forever struggling for resources and power. How is any form of social stability achieved if modes of production are invariably privileging a few over the many? Why would the many put up with it? Shouldn’t they just throw the few out? The answer lies in the ideology. To Marxians, ideology refers to a body of beliefs shared within a society. More than that, ideology hides existing inequalities from those who suffer from them. It also naturalizes those inequities in ways that put them beyond question. In short, ideology legitimizes the inevitable hierarchies generated by the mode of production, making them seem right and just. Ideology, therefore, plays the crucial role of encouraging all members of a society, no matter how their faction fares in resource competitions, to accept the current mode of production and to do their part in reproducing it. You might be a peasant who works long hours in your fields only to surrender part of your crop to a lord living in a glorious mansion that you and your fellows helped to build. Is that fair? Well, maybe it is if that lord rules by divine right. Who are you, after all, to question the fact that the deity chose this noble to be your master? It is out of your hands and besides, you may be looking forward to a mansion of your own in the afterlife—or some other wonderful reward—if you work hard and meet your obligations to monarch and society in this life. This is what Marx was getting at when he described religion as the opiate of the people. Ideology (including, but not limited to, religion) induces a delusional state. The believer is convinced that the mode of production and its inherent inequalities are right, natural, and unchangeable. Without the ideology the mode of production could not continue to operate since its

Marxism I: Trade and Power  103

functioning relies on the willing labor of all. Securing acquiescence to what is supposed to be inevitable is the aim of ideology. An ideology’s form is shaped by the particular mode of production it ­rationalizes. Its component beliefs and values are geared to addressing the specific tensions and inequalities that characterize a mode of production. Any society, therefore, consists of a dominant mode of production (sometimes called the base) and a dominant ideology (also called the superstructure) that encourages general compliance with, and participation in, the operation of that mode of production. In most Marxian approaches, the material reality of the mode of production determines the belief system embodied in the ideology. Once created, however, base and superstructure are mutually dependent and reinforcing. Together, a society’s mode of production and ideology comprise the structure that constrains and enables human behavior. Existing largely outside our awareness, this framework defines who we are and what we can do by the ways in which it apportions tangible (forces and means of production) and conceptual resources (ideology) to people who are organized within different factions to use those assets in the exercise of power (relations of production). Behavior is explained when it is demonstrated how it functions to secure resources needed to exercise power in its several forms. Why bury an individual with great pomp and circumstance in the heart of a temple? Because by highlighting the deceased’s privileged supernatural connections her successor establishes a preeminent position as the legitimate descendant of a divine monarch. In this case, ideological resources are put to use fending off usurpers, rationalizing inequality, and establishing a monopoly over the right to exercise power over an entire realm. Why are workshops devoted to making bronze tools concentrated near elite residences? Because the lords living there are seeking to control exclusively the forces, relations, and means of production that yield goods all may want but which can only be obtained from those at the hierarchy’s apex—when the apex controls production. Such monopolies are important resources in exercising power over others who must follow a leader’s dictates or lose access to esteemed bronze implements. Some Marxian approaches allow for modest amounts of individual or group agency, or the ability to make choices, in shaping societies and changing their forms. People and their factions may actively seek power through manipulating various aspects of production and then try to enshrine their preeminence in potent ideologies. At the same time, others are moving to protect some level of autonomy by challenging those pretentions as they attempt to turn ideologies and productive forces to their advantage. This agency is not limitless. The choices enabled by agency depend on what we can imagine doing and what resources we can secure from the mode of production and ideology to make those imaginings come true. Overthrowing a mode of production and ideology is beyond the reach of most of us. Nonetheless, our lives are not determined by the mode of production and ideology into

104  Marxism I: Trade and Power

which we are born. We can innovate within these limits and our innovations can result in long-term, significant, if often unintended, consequences. As Marx remarked, people make history but not under conditions of their own choosing. The mode of production and its associated ideology define those conditions. Besides, there is always the possibility that we will see through the smoke and mirrors of the ideology, perceive the reality of exploitive relations within the mode of production, and take steps to reform that system for the benefit of all. This is what Marx hoped. Much work in the social sciences inspired by his writings seeks to achieve such liberation by revealing what Marxian researchers believe is the fundamental inequality intrinsic to our particular mode of production: capitalism. Marxian archaeologists often seek to make generalizations about human behavior. Since there are a limited number of environments in which people have lived, and limited ways of organizing the forces, relations, and means of production to secure energy from them, it is highly likely that similar modes of production and their ideological rationalizations will recur among historically unrelated societies. It is the goal of many Marxian archaeologists to identify these regularities and to explain their appearances and histories in terms of the basic, universally applicable premise that all behaviors can be explained by demonstrating how they function to secure and use resources in the exercise of power. In sum, Marxian archaeologists differ considerably from processualists in their views of people, history, and the places of materials in understanding both. Whereas processualists imagine people as cooperating to promote adaptation, Marxian archaeologists argue that we are working together to secure resources and exercise power to the benefit of our factions. History to processualists is, therefore, a gradual unfolding of positive outcomes that generally benefit us all. In contrast, Marxian archaeologists see history as a tension-filled, never-resolved competition among factions for preeminence. Change, which to processualists largely results from forces upsetting balanced adaptive cultural systems, for Marxian archaeologists can emerge from ­resource and power competitions occurring within a culture. To Marxian archaeologists and processualists the study of material remains reveals crucial insights into history and culture. In the latter school attention focuses largely on the functions of these items in promoting adaptation. For Marxian archaeologists, artifacts and features are significant in that they are the resources, and/or the means by which those assets are secured, through which power is exercised. For example, a processualist confronted with a stone axe might ask what its adaptive function was. A Marxian archaeologist would want to know this as well as who benefitted from the tool’s use. Was it equally available to all in a society or did a few monopolize control over this implement? Was the stone used in the object’s manufacture imported by a few, its distribution to axe makers a means by which power was exercised over those artisans? Processualists and Marxian archaeologists may well be materialists,

Marxism I: Trade and Power  105

inspired by the Modernist ideal of creating a science of archaeology that seeks to meet human needs in the present. How they understand materialism and archaeology’s contribution to identifying and addressing society’s ills are very different.

Marxian Methods Research driven by Marxian principles employs many of the same methods developed by processualists. In part this is because the two schools of thought share the materialist assumption that the most important goal of human actions is to guarantee a society’s physical survival. Reconstructing the economic functions of artifacts and features is, therefore, a major concern in both schools, as is reconstructing the environments from which crucial energy was being extracted. Functional and ecological analyses address the crucial issues of describing the nexus among physical settings, on the one hand, and the forces and means of production on the other. Where the schools diverge is in the Marxian focus on the relations of production. Processualists are certainly interested in how people organized their interpersonal dealings. These relations are seen as outcomes, not crucial components, of the technology–demography–environment nexus that is assigned causal primacy. This is not the case for Marxian archaeologists who argue that technology and the social relations by which it was put to work are equally important and inseparable. Attempts to describe the relations of production do not yield distinctive methods equivalent to, say, flotation or pollen analysis. For example, settlement pattern studies are often turned to Marxian ends. Attention is now paid to variations in wealth and power across entire cultures that might provide evidence for exploitive relations, insights into how they were structured, and a sense of how successful they were. Pursuing these topics requires defining crucial variables, most important among which are wealth and power themselves. Wealth is difficult to tease out from archaeological data. It is often defined as the ability to control objects of value. Value, however, is culturally constructed, the worldview of one group privileging some goods that those operating from a different perspective find worthless. In an effort to get around this problem archaeologists often equate an item’s value with the time and skill required to make and acquire it. The more steps involved in fashioning something, the more skills required to perform those steps, and the greater the distance from which the raw material used in its manufacture traveled, the more valuable an artifact would have been. When dealing with animal and plant remains an object’s value is often equated with its local rarity, difficulty to prepare or capture, and/or the quantity and nutritional quality of the food represented by the item. All parts of an animal are not equally endowed with easily consumed comparably large parcels of meat. If the meatiest parts of animals are regularly found in some households while others consistently yield

106  Marxism I: Trade and Power

those body parts with the least meat, then we might argue that the former are better off materially than are the latter. If those same meat-rich households also have preferential access to plants and animals imported from outside their region then our estimation of their wealth is significantly heightened. These and other comparable measures are based on ethnographic analogies, comparing how people in different cultures assess the significance of objects and how their evaluations are related to the factors outlined here. Though crude, such measures of value have the advantage of defining a continuum for assessing the esteem in which objects were held. Taking value into account in archaeological analyses means changing yet again how artifacts are categorized. In addition to stylistic and functional variables, measures of manufacturing complexity and origins of objects have to be considered. Such shifts need not mean developing new typologies. They do require, at least, reconsidering the implications of existing categorizations for answering questions of inequality. In the case of the type–variety system we were using to classify ceramics in the Naco Valley, we rethought our existing types in terms of how many distinct steps were required to make and decorate them. This new interest, in turn, sent us more deeply into the craft production literature to get a clearer sense of how the bowls, jars, basins, and the like that we were finding were made and decorated. The result was a re-sorting of pottery categories arrayed along a continuum describing levels of complexity in their manufacture. Imports were distinguished from locally made vessels by other criteria, including: • • •

relative frequencies (local wares being more commonly represented in artifact collections than foreign examples); evidence of stylistic discontinuities (imports demonstrating no clear connections to well-developed earlier styles in a region); chemical and mineral composition (foreign and local vessels, made of different mixtures of clay and temper, should be distinguishable based on quantitative and qualitative assessments of their respective pastes).

Power is another difficult variable to assess through archaeology, not the least because it can assume different forms. Even in our daily lives, power is less a thing that can be held and measured and more a process that is experienced in its performance. Those performances often leave relatively few material remains. In archaeology, a crude proxy for the exercise of power over others is usually some measure of the labor invested in raising public architecture and monuments to elites. Based on ethnographic analogies, the premise is that one of the main goals of elites in exercising power over others is to control the labor of their subordinates. The projects to which that labor is directed can take many forms, some of which leave behind tangible remains. Thus, for example, sites dominated by massive administrative, religious, and elite residential complexes are taken to have been the capitals of powerful lords. These constructions instantiate not only a ruling faction’s command

Marxism I: Trade and Power  107

of commoner labor but also their capacity to plan such projects and see them carried out. Settlements lacking such ostentatious displays of communal labor were homes to those who controlled fewer resources that could be used in the exercise of power. Evidence of past people performing the power to define and achieve goals in opposition to centralized rule is harder to see. We as a profession have not devoted as much thought to developing measures of such everyday uses of power. Paying attention to variations in construction sizes across settlements is one way in which archaeologists can evaluate how successful those outside the charmed circle of elite power have been at preserving some level of ­autonomy. Such work often reveals that ancient hierarchically structured, ­politically centralized realms were arenas in which power was contested among factions who were variably successful in securing the assets needed to exercise it. Correlating these variations in physical expressions of power with other variables, such as proximity to the capital, engagement in different economic pursuits, or expressions of allegiance to the throne, may provide ways of understanding how people of all ranks maneuvered to seize and defend power. For example, was power accrued by those who ostentatiously proclaimed their loyalty to rulers by prominently displaying symbols associated with the latter? Alternatively, were those situated on the most fertile soils in a region able to use that advantage to gain a modest amount of local preeminence if not paramount elite status? Assessing relations between architecture and power has been greatly aided by experiments in archaeology that seek to quantify how much energy would be required to raise buildings of certain sizes using the materials and technologies available to the original builders. This form of analogical reasoning through conducting experiments can be important in translating site hierarchies based on construction sizes into inferences about how much power was exercised by those for whom an edifice was raised.

Returning to the Naco Valley in 1988: World Systems Theory The theoretical landscape of archaeology had changed between when we left the Naco Valley in 1979 and returned to work there in 1988. Processualism was still the dominant conceptual framework while investigations of trade and its sociopolitical consequences intensified over this period. Many trade studies still focused on the adaptive significance of goods exchange—for example, how members of ancient societies used imported commodities to meet their basic needs. On the other hand, but not opposed, were examinations of trade inspired by Marx and the ideas derived from his work. Many Marxian analyses of ancient states, like those conducted by their processualist cousins, focus on developments that took place within particular societies. The crucial processes yielding hierarchical social relations and power centralization involved interactions among groups of people who lived

108  Marxism I: Trade and Power

together and drew resources from the same immediate environment. Inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein’s (see Box 5.4) world systems theory (WST), some researchers began to challenge this perspective. Wallerstein, a Marxian sociologist, wrote several influential volumes, beginning in the 1970s, that questioned traditional models of global relations. He argued that economic dealings among the world’s populations have since at least the fifteenth century been increasingly structured by a capitalist mode of production and exchange that favors the leaders of a few core states at the  expense of the rest. The process works as follows. Agents of the largest, most complexly structured core states use their superior military power and organizational structures to extract from smaller, more simply organized ­peripheries low-cost raw materials obtained through the cheap labor of those living there. These items are converted by core industries into expensive finished goods which are exported back to peripheries at a high markup. Wealth thus consistently flows from peripheries to cores, where it finances core militaries and industries, and contributes to the growing power and wealth of Box 5.4  Immanuel Wallerstein Immanuel Wallerstein is a sociologist who early in his career was concerned with the unequal economic relations that pertain on a global scale and with the historical roots of those inequities. Based in part on his early studies of post-colonial developments in Africa, ­Wallerstein rejected traditional Western approaches to economic development that imagined third world nations engaged in a steady process of transformation towards first world models of wealth and democracy. Rather, Wallerstein elaborated on earlier versions of dependency theory which stressed that global capitalism has been, and will continue to be, predicated on the systematic exploitation of most of the world’s populations by the leaders of a few core states. The utility of Wallerstein’s world systems theory has been much debated throughout the social sciences, one salient criticism being that he tends to emphasize economic processes at the expense of cultural variables in understanding interactions among nations. Nonetheless, some proponents of the ­anti-globalization movement have celebrated Wallerstein’s early critiques of global capitalism. In addition, as illustrated here, some archaeologists have modified his insights to understand inter-societal dealings in non-capitalist contexts. Whatever this theory’s fate, it continues to inspire interpretations of the past and present by calling attention to the spatially extensive economic, social, and political structures in which local developments occur and to which they contribute.

Marxism I: Trade and Power  109

core elites. Impoverished peripheries, in turn, lack the economic wherewithal to sustain complex hierarchical political structures or the military apparatus needed to resist core demands. Consequently, their political systems are far simpler and their populations poorer than those of cores. These distinctions contribute to their continued exploitation, as they cannot muster the economic, military, and political means to deal with cores as equals. World systems theory encouraged archaeologists to appreciate that: 1) All societies are linked in significant ways within expansive structures that include multiple societies and factions organized at varying levels of complexity. 2) Understanding occurrences within any part of an interaction web requires specifying a society’s place within the flow of goods that characterizes this network. 3) Those transactions are inevitably unequal in character and effect, thus helping to create political and economic hierarchies at local and regional levels. A mode of production could, therefore, operate over vast territories, include multiple societies, and be defined in part by unequal relations of exchange. Trade, in this view, was not used just to secure necessities but also served as a means for exercising power over distant others. This dominion was ensured by structuring the flow of goods in ways that enriched those leading the largest, most complexly organized societies (cores) and impoverished their smaller, more simply structured neighbors (peripheries). World systems theory (abbreviated as WTS) provided, to our eyes, a more systematic framework for understanding inter-societal interactions than did diffusion. In particular, we entertained the idea that the Late Classic peak of both population and political power revealed by the 1974–1979 research in the Naco Valley might have been spurred by intensifying contacts with members of surrounding societies, especially, but not limited to, Copán’s rulers. If La Sierra’s paramount lords exercised exclusive control over the foreign transactions by which such valued goods as obsidian and imported polychrome vessels were acquired, then they would have had a decided edge in local power competitions. The labor and surpluses of subordinates would have been surrendered in exchange for gifts of exotic blades and pots available only from rulers. Once begun, this process might have set in motion a whole host of changes in Late Classic Naco Valley society. For example, agricultural production may have intensified when rewarded by gifts of foreign goods to compliant farmers. Bureaucracies staffed by lesser nobility might have been amplified as rulers sought to exercise greater control over these surpluses. Trade monopolies therefore may have become the pillars on which an e­ ver-more-complex hierarchy dominated by La Sierra’s rulers was built. Several features of our earlier hypotheses had shifted along with the theoretical ground in which they were rooted. Copán, though it still loomed

110  Marxism I: Trade and Power

large in our thinking, was no longer simply a source of ideas mimicked by the rulers of peripheral societies. Instead, valuables and concepts acquired from Copán, and other realms were resources strategically manipulated by La Sierra’s nobility to convert their former peers in the basin into subordinates. Power had, in short, moved to the center of our analysis, becoming the primary variable on which the 1988 investigations would focus. In addition, like many of our colleagues, we did not subscribe to a strict application of world systems theory in which peripheries were structurally constrained to be impoverished with respect to cores. Instead, Copán, or any lowland Maya center, was a source of ideas and items (conceptual and tangible resources) that were creatively used by Naco Valley rulers to obtain their own ends. The result was not the development of underdevelopment predicted by world systems theory, but the enhancement of local notables’ status through their strategic use of high-value foreign goods and ideas. This situation was based on the inability of elites from any lowland Maya core state to dictate the terms of interaction through their overwhelming military, economic, or political advantages. Copán might have been a far larger, more populous, and complexly organized realm than any of its Southeast Periphery compatriots. Its rulers and their agents did not, however, control their near neighbors. Some degree of individual agency had crept into the theory. We believed that La Sierra’s rulers played active roles in shaping valley society by manipulating their privileged ties with distant lords. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the population did not have much say in the matter. Trapped within dependency relations, they could do little but admire the accomplishments of their leaders and hope, by dint of good behavior, to benefit from their generosity or, more likely, gain from the elites’ desire to acquire and manipulate clients. Power therefore was conceptualized primarily as the dominion of a few over the many, such preeminence enabled by the creation of an extensive interaction network that incorporated many societies through unequal processes of exchange. This mix of structure and agency, combined with an increasing attention to structural power (modes of production and exchange), indicates a decided shift toward Marxian interpretations in our work. The changed perspective sketched above derives far more from shifts in our ways of thinking than it does from any new discoveries in the Naco Valley. The data were the same as they had been in 1979, but our understanding of them had changed. As noted in Chapter 1, estimations of what constitutes an inference to the best explanation are based, in part, on the array of hypotheses and the theories underlying them that researchers see as relevant. Our new appreciation for the utility of WST in our work opened an array of interpretive possibilities of which we were not previously aware. Part of this change in our viewpoints followed from research we conducted in 1983–1986, 45 km southeast of the Naco Valley along the middle Ulua River with Dr. Wendy Ashmore (now retired from the University of California at Riverside). Our understanding of this middle Ulua work led us to rethink how trade might have figured in elite efforts to gain and hold power.

Marxism I: Trade and Power  111

In particular, within the Late Classic middle Ulua basin, power was seemingly concentrated in the hands of those notables best positioned to control contacts with a wide range of neighboring societies. Their capital, G ­ ualjoquito, lies where passes connecting the middle Ulua valley to areas on the west, east, north, and south converge. Imports coming from all these places, including Copán, were concentrated here. Large constructions at Gualjoquito were also organized according to models derived from Copán. This arrangement suggested that middle Ulua rulers welcomed both goods and site planning principles from the lowland Maya. Such a correlation among strategic position, evidence of foreign connections, and concentration of power implied that the above factors were causally related. It also suggested that we needed to take a closer look at the trade and world systems literature and at La Sierra, where evidence of similar external contacts might have been concentrated in the Naco Valley. The hypothesis outlined above helped us to make sense of the middle Ulua data, and we had high hopes that it would also clarify processes of political centralization in the Late Classic Naco Valley. Adopting a novel theory also encouraged us to reappraise Urban and Henderson’s earlier work, highlighting biases in the data we had acknowledged but not thought significant. Excavations at La Sierra had previously concentrated in the architecturally interesting, but artifact-poor, site core. Perhaps investigation of other residential portions of the center would yield better information on external contacts. Digging in rural settlements, we reasoned, would not turn up much evidence of inter-societal interactions if their occupants were at the end of the receiving line for imports. Rather, it would be residents of the capital, living close to the elites who we thought engaged in long-distance exchanges, who would be the primary recipients of goods acquired from afar. Pat recognized this bias in 1979 but ignored it because her results fit with her notion of the area’s marginal position with respect to lowland Maya developments. There were also practical considerations that included lack of money, time, and permission to excavate at La Sierra. Returning to the world of ideas, however, recent shifts in trade and world systems theory questioned whether any society could be as remote from external contacts as we both imagined the Late Classic Naco Valley to have been. These changes in ideas led us to reconsider old data in a new light. To be sure, some aspects of our theory had not changed. Lowland Maya rulers of Copán and, to some extent, Quiriguá were still thought to have played primary roles in catalyzing Southeast Mesoamerican developments. We assumed that the great size and complexity of these realms provided lowland Maya monarchs with the means and incentives to establish contacts over long distances. Organizing such large political units gave Copanec and Quiriguá aristocrats the experience needed to structure the inter-societal ties that kept goods flowing into their centers. Further, these imports were essential to providing large lowland Maya populations with basic commodities, such as obsidian used to make essential tools, and exotic jewelry and pottery that

112  Marxism I: Trade and Power

served as badges of prominence within ever more intricate hierarchies. Thus, Copán’s and Quiriguá’s foremost lords’ search for imports initiated political and economic shifts among their smaller, more simply structured neighbors. Once begun, however, these processes took on lives of their own. We also continued to presume that these power contests yielded only moderately complex, fairly small political units in the Naco Valley. To our thinking, the Late Classic basin was ruled by a few entrepreneurial elites perched atop a mass of commoners. The latter might look to their rulers for valued imports but still met their own survival needs largely by themselves (work on craft production in the valley by John Douglass and others was still in the future). La Sierra’s rulers could lure supporters to their cause, using exotic items to pry labor and surpluses from them. They could not threaten the basic existence of the economically self-sufficient households in which the majority of people lived. Lacking this ability, rulers had to mute the demands they made of their followers. Otherwise, subordinates would decide that returns in the form of obsidian blades and painted pottery did not repay long hours tilling fields and building large platforms for elites. As our earlier theoretical position implied, this current formulation proposed that commoners could then turn their backs on leaders and there was little that the latter could do about it. Finally, the new formulation continued to emphasize the political importance of imported obsidian and decorated pottery in political processes. Pat had earlier seen these items as goods La Sierra’s Late Classic rulers used to secure the loyalty of clients. The difference now was that we hypothesized that the quantities of foreign blades and pots circulating within the Naco Valley were much greater than we had formerly imagined. Their large volume enabled aspiring elites to capture the labor of followers more effectively than when we thought there was only a trickle of such goods down the hierarchy.

Setting to Work in 1988: Tying Up Loose Ends, Getting Entangled in New Threads We concentrated our efforts at La Sierra during 1988, based on the assumption that it was the center of long-distance contacts for the Late Classic valley. The entire site was cleared of vegetation and remapped: we could take advantage of the reduced ground cover to record buildings missed during earlier work. An intensive survey within a 1 km radius of the center was also pursued. This zone had not been systematically investigated before. Excavations were also initiated at the capital within 12 patio-focused structure groups, one of which was extensively cleared. Some of our digging continued the work begun in the site core by John Henderson, but most of the research was conducted in the densely settled area immediately north of the monumental center. We were not now excavating deep probes to obtain information needed to reconstruct the local chronology. Instead, efforts were devoted to clearing areas

Marxism I: Trade and Power  113

around platforms seen on the surface. Our goal was to maximize the recovery of materials that would contribute to reconstructing ancient behaviors. This meant identifying recurrent associations among artifacts, architecture, and other remains, such as the few fragments of plants and animals we recovered. It was by studying the patterned relations among a wide range of these objects that we hoped to infer the activities pursued by La Sierra’s Late Classic inhabitants as well as the importance of trade goods in their daily lives. The limited test trenching conducted in 1975–1979 did not yield this kind of information because only relatively small areas were exposed. The mapping and survey programs gave us our first surprises. La Sierra, it turned out, was far larger than we had imagined. The center held 468 structures crammed within 0.7 km 2 (Figure 2.4). This made La Sierra 10 times the size of the next largest Late Classic valley site. An additional 237 Late Classic constructions were found packed into an area within 1 km of the capital, which we referred to as La Sierra’s Near Periphery. It ultimately turned out that slightly less than one-third of all known Late Classic buildings were located within La Sierra and its immediate environs: 29 percent of the buildings occupying 2 percent of the valley. Why had so many people chosen to reside so close together? Living within such a densely settled area was probably inconvenient in many ways. Simply finding ways to cope with all the waste material generated by such a large population would have severely challenged the group’s ingenuity. An insufficiency of good farmland within and around the capital would have been just as pressing. La Sierra’s residents probably traveled several kilometers on foot to reach their fields. Certainly, it would have been more convenient for them to settle closer to their land. Why did Late Classic Naqueños make such sacrifices? Our first thought was that La Sierra’s environs contained a particularly attractive set of resources important to the pursuit of farming. The exploitation of these putative assets would have repaid the travails of living packed together. Conversations with current residents of the area, supported by field observations and Kirk Anderson’s research, confirmed that La Sierra was situated in the midst of well-watered, fertile, river-deposited alluvium that could have reliably supported large crop yields. Broad expanses of arable land, some more productive than La Sierra’s soils, were, however, also found near perennial water sources in other parts of the Naco Valley. These tracts did not support such concentrated populations. If soil fertility and access to streams determined settlement locations, La Sierra should have had building densities not markedly greater than those found in other, equally well-situated valley segments. La Sierra’s marked divergence from this expected pattern suggested that other factors were at work attracting people to this spot. Gradually, we concluded that La Sierra’s rulers actively encouraged settlement around their capital. Such actions were taken, we argued, to enhance elite control over subordinates. Travel within the basin was on foot, so maintaining commoner loyalty may well have depended on keeping them close.

114  Marxism I: Trade and Power

Such proximity would have facilitated collecting tribute, conscripting labor for major building projects, and ensuring that subordinates would not be lured away by others seeking to build a following with which to usurp paramount authority. The degree of population concentration we were seeing implied that valley rulers were far more powerful than we had imagined. What was the basis of this power? Here we hit a wall. Was control over trade enough to attract and hold supporters at the center? The answer, as is so often the case, came in the form of a surprise. Here we return to the shell fragments that we sweated over in March 1988—we talked about them in Chapter 1. These few pieces, it turned out, were part of a deposit that contained 1,256 fragments of marine shell, mostly conch, mixed with 12 pieces of coral (Figure 5.1). Associated with these items was a type of stone tool we had never seen before in the basin (Figure 5.2). These implements stood out because they were made of chert; the majority of stone implements in Late Classic Naco Valley assemblages were fashioned from imported obsidian. The forms of these chert tools were also distinctive. Their long, tapered points had sturdy ends that were well suited for cutting and engraving some resistant material. Shell was the best candidate, since these implements were almost never found in the valley apart from conch fragments. What we had found was a workshop, located a scant 45 m north of La Sierra’s site core, in which large pieces of raw shell and, to a lesser extent, coral were shaped into artifact blanks from which artifacts, such as beads, could be made. There was no evidence that the last stages of shell artifact manufacture occurred here. La Sierra’s artisans apparently made blanks that were converted into finished goods outside the valley (you can read an account of the excavations at this workshop here: http://digital.kenyon.edu/ honduras/13831).

Figure 5.1  Sample of coral and shell recovered at La Sierra in 1988.

Marxism I: Trade and Power  115

Figure 5.2  A  n example of the distinctive chert tools found in the shell-and-coral workshop.

Figure 5.3  Polyhedral obsidian cores used in the manufacture of blades.

This was just the beginning. No other shell workshops were found that year. In fact, very few have come to light in subsequent seasons, and none were as large as this first one. What we did find, however, was significant evidence that some of La Sierra’s inhabitants were devoting their time to fashioning blades from imported obsidian cores (Figure 5.3). Up to this point, we had found blades at just about all excavated Late Classic Naco Valley sites but no signs of the nuclei from which they had been struck. These cores have a distinctive polyhedral (multifaceted) form, rather like an upside-down fireplug with inward-sloping sides continuing to a

116  Marxism I: Trade and Power

point. Blades are removed from a nucleus by applying pressure to the edge of the core’s flat platform (corresponding to the flat base of a fireplug). A knapper (one who makes stone tools by removing pieces from them) carefully strikes long, thin flakes from the sides moving concentrically around the perimeter. Core preparation is a demanding job, and fashioning blades takes considerable skill and practice to conduct successfully. The absence of cores in the valley up through 1979 suggested that its Late Classic residents lacked these skills and acquired their blades ready-made from producers living elsewhere in Southeast Mesoamerica. The most likely provider was Copán, where obsidian, mostly obtained from the nearby Ixtepeque flows, was plentiful. The recovery of 14 polyhedral obsidian cores from the same residential compound in La Sierra that yielded the shell was therefore quite a shock. Here, for the first time, we had clear evidence that the Naco Valley’s Late Classic inhabitants were making blades from imported cores. As excavations proceeded throughout 1988, additional cores were retrieved from other household compounds at La Sierra. These finds suggested that participation in blade knapping was widespread, but not universal, at the center. Finds of shell debris and obsidian cores forced us to accept the idea that specialized craft production had been pursued at La Sierra. Our older view, in which all households engaged in the same economic tasks, was no longer tenable. The significance of these findings was yet to sink in. Digging at La Sierra did yield large quantities of sherds from foreign vessels (about 5 percent of the pottery fragments analyzed from the 1988 La Sierra excavations were from elaborately decorated imported wares, many of which were painted in three or more colors; Figures 5.4 and 5.5). At least something was going according to plan. The Late Classic Naco Valley, it turns out, was

Figure 5.4  Fragment of an elaborately decorated ceramic vessel made in the Naco Valley.

Marxism I: Trade and Power  117

Figure 5.5  E  xample from an imported polychrome ceramic vessel found in the Naco Valley.

not isolated from distant contacts. The concentration of foreign pottery at La Sierra confirmed this point, just as it suggested that the transactions by which these vessels were acquired was centrally controlled. Rulers, it seemed, obtained elaborately decorated containers from their trading partners in other realms, concentrating this wealth at their capital. Residents of the center, then, received a certain portion of this bounty, possibly as rewards for settling so close to the locus of elite power. A few of the valued containers filtered out gradually to those living elsewhere in the valley, thereby accounting for the small number of foreign sherds we had located in excavations pursued during the 1970s. Our WST-inspired hypothesis had been partially right, predicting that further investigations within La Sierra’s residential zones would yield substantial evidence of the imported goods that valley rulers used to secure power. On just about every other point, however, we had been wrong. The La Sierra realm was dominated by powerful elites who successfully meddled in the daily lives of their followers, even affecting where they chose to live. Our image of economically redundant households was seriously questioned by evidence for production of shell blanks and obsidian artifacts in a few domestic groups at the basin’s capital. We could only shudder at how close we had come to writing Naco Valley prehistory based solely on the results obtained through 1979. Had we done so, we would have enshrined some very profound errors in the archaeological literature. This realization encouraged us to shelve plans for future research outside the Naco area. We needed to develop a new ideas to account for the valley’s newly acquired data and test it against a much larger sample of materials. Given how wrong we had been in the past, it was only sensible to make sure that what we

118  Marxism I: Trade and Power

thought we were seeing now was an accurate picture of Late Classic Naco Valley society. What we were faced with is a common situation when reasoning by inference to the best explanation. We started out 1988 with some basic observations concerning the Late Classic Naco Valley: La Sierra was the basin’s capital; its rulers held sway over their subordinates, drawing sustenance and labor from them; that power was limited, as suggested by the relatively small size of the center and the economic self-sufficiency of all Late Classic households. To account for this pattern we drew on WST, a version of Marxian thought. In doing so we hypothesized that elite power was based on centralized control over imported ceramics and obsidian blades. These goods, based on their widespread distribution throughout the valley, were likely desired by all but obtainable only from rulers. Those leaders were the only valley residents with the time, diplomatic skills, and political connections needed to acquire imports in any quantity. Still, exercising power through local monopolies over the distribution of a few imports was a weak basis for controlling subordinates. Because the latter could feed, clothe, and house themselves by their own efforts, they needed elites a lot less than those notables needed them. Paramount power would consequently be limited. It turns out that a crucial variable in that inference to the best explanation was wrong. New data, encountered accidentally, suggested that specialized craft manufacture was occurring at the Late Classic capital. Could our original hypothesis based on WST accommodate this new information? Maybe, if we stretched it. Nevertheless, to us, this version of Marxian thought did not have much to say about possible linkages between power and craft production. This says nothing about the general utility of WST in explaining human behavior. It simply did not provide the concepts we needed to account for our expanding array of findings. We, therefore, ended the 1988 field season with several conclusions. We had to develop new hypotheses based on theories we had not yet considered. These theories would need to focus on how craft production might have figured in the Naco Valley’s Late Classic political economy. That phrase refers to the ways in which processes of production, consumption, and exchange are harnessed through the relations of production to support the exercise of power by different factions. The theories we sought would likely come from Marxian thought, as this school provided the richest array of options for dealing with questions of power. We also had to come to grips with ways of recognizing evidence for, and describing the practices of, craft production. Up to now we had assumed that specialized manufacture was not relevant to understanding Naco Valley prehistory. Consequently, we had not delved deeply into the literature on this topic. The unexpected finds made in 1988 changed that situation.

6 Marxism II Prestige Goods Theory

Preparing to return to the field in 1990, we forwarded John Yellen a draft of a grant proposal we were writing to support an investigation of craft production at La Sierra. John was the director of archaeology at the National Science Foundation and that organization remains a major funder of research in our archaeology. He returned the copy with numerous insightful comments. He also asked one telling question concerning our sources. Why, he wanted to know, were there so few references in our proposal to work conducted outside Mesoamerica? Surely there were other archaeologists investigating relations among power and craft manufacture besides those we identified in our own world area. It seems obvious now, but as of 1989 we were still very much looking to our colleagues studying in the Maya lowlands and, to a lesser extent, other portions of Mesoamerica for theories. John’s question encouraged us to explore the broader literature dealing with crafts and power, looking at what people investigating the Scandinavian Bronze Age (1800–500 BC) and the Chalcolithic (copper age) of Mesopotamia (4500–3500 BC), as well as other areas and time periods, were saying about these issues. The result was that we belatedly discovered prestige goods theory.

Prestige Goods Theory Prestige goods theory (PGT) is a Marxist-inspired framework that was originally developed to understand political relations among people living in current and historically known West African cultures. It posits that centralized control over the acquisition, production, and/or distribution of social valuables can be an effective means of fashioning hierarchical political structures. Social valuables are items that are essential to defining, reinforcing, and reproducing relations among people or between people and supernatural entities. Thus, in the West African examples esteemed items were given to mark and legitimize such life-changing events as births, marriages, and funerals, and were used in mending social ties broken by feuds. These happenings mark major transformations in a person’s social identity by helping define who they are and how they are connected to others. Such conceptual shifts emerge and become tangible through actions, especially those involving the

120  Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory

exchange of symbolically charged items. Think of your own social relations. Maintaining ties with others requires work, and part of that work often involves gift-­g iving. Every time you give a relative or friend a gift, that personal connection is materialized. Every time you leave someone off your gift list, the relationship dwindles in significance. We define ourselves with respect to other important individuals by interacting with them. Gift-giving is one of the most explicit forms of those behaviors by which we define ourselves as social beings. Prestige goods theory assumes that such linkages between gifts and social ties are universal, or at least common enough to serve as a starting point for theorizing. Given the importance of exchanging gifts to virtually everyone’s social persona, those who monopolize the flow of social valuables central to a society’s gift-giving processes can literally control how people define themselves, as well as how effectively they can maintain crucial social connections. The monopolists are in a powerful position to direct the actions of the majority. Failure to follow orders could result in exclusion from those goods that are essential to the social processes by which everyone identifies themselves and their place in the world. Living a meaningful existence depends on obeying those who make achieving basic social goals possible. Hence, the prominence of many West African village leaders was, and sometimes is, based in part on their exclusive control over the objects young men in particular need to give in those exchanges through which brides are acquired, disputes resolved, and the births of children legitimated. Anyone who cannot secure the necessary valuables can never become a respected adult. They can never be a full social person. Localized monopolies over the disbursement of certain precious goods, therefore, are used in strategies to create political structures in which the power of a few is based on their capacity to undercut the social autonomy of the many. The majority, therefore, become dependents of the privileged minority. The transactions through which social valuables flow from monopolists to their dependents are frequently called exchanges. This charade maintains the fiction of equality among the partners. Exchange, however, masks exploitive relationships in which the monopolists receive more than they give. In adopting PGT, therefore, we still viewed political structures as the outcomes of struggles among factions whose members enjoyed unequal access to resources. Those assets, in turn were used by people in the exercise of power over others and to achieve their own aims. The easiest social valuables to control are those that must be imported or that require specialized skills to make. Foreign items are not usually subject to traditional ownership claims within the recipient society the way that, say, farmland almost certainly is. Elite claims on imports do not run as great a risk of alienating the affections, or the property, of potential followers. Production techniques that are difficult to learn and require considerable practice to maintain can also be monopolized by those who are able to subsidize manufacturers and thus free the artisans from having to feed and house themselves.

Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory  121

The vast majority of the population will simply not have the time to acquire, practice, and perfect such specialized skills. It is also often the case that an object’s social value is positively affected by its foreign origin as well as the skilled labor invested in its manufacture. Both factors speak to the amount of effort expended in acquiring the item. That effort frequently involves accomplishing tasks fraught with difficulty, such as crossing territorial boundaries or working fragile materials. You can see the Marxian roots of PGT. Like most Marxian thought, PGT focuses on how the mode of production serves to promote the interests of a few over the desires of the many. The technologies, raw materials, and facilities of different industries are mobilized to produce goods and inequalities through the relations of production. Those relations of production are defined by centralized monopolies over the manufacture and distribution of valued items. Needed by all, the latter are obtainable only from members of an elite faction that controls the forces and means of production. We wondered if PGT accurately described the political economy of the Late Classic Naco Valley.

How PGT Related to What We Knew in 1988 The lack of shell artifacts within the Late Classic Naco Valley meant that they were probably not employed as social valuables here (although we think the coral might have been used to shape the shell, not as a valuable in its own right). Conch artifacts did serve this purpose in other areas, such as the Copán valley, where they were symbols of leadership and prestige. This patterning suggested to us that elite monopolies over the manufacture of shell blanks in the basin would have given these notables a decided edge in conducting the inter-societal transactions through which such valuables as obsidian cores and polychrome painted pottery were obtained. Those who could not offer shell blanks to foreign potentates would find it hard, if not impossible, to take part in these politically vital long-distance transfers. By controlling shell-blank manufacture, therefore, La Sierra’s rulers ensured that they alone among Late Classic valley residents had access to the imported items used to attract and hold supporters. Obsidian blades, on the other hand, were widely distributed throughout the Late Classic valley, strongly suggesting that people of every social station needed and used these implements. If they were only manufactured under elite supervision at La Sierra, members of all ranks would be dependent on their rulers for an essential commodity. The concentration of sherds from exotic ceramic containers at the capital further supported the notion that valley rulers were the conduits by which these foreign valuables entered the basin. Just about every Late Classic site, regardless of size, yielded small numbers of foreign pottery fragments along with obsidian blades. Such ubiquity implied that elaborately decorated imported vessels played a significant role in the social lives of every member of the realm. Reliance on La Sierra’s rulers for

122  Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory

essential pottery containers reinforced dependency relations forged through elite monopolies over obsidian blades. We were gradually reformulating our vision of the Naco Valley’s Late Classic political economy. Rulers at La Sierra commanded the labor and loyalty of their followers primarily by doling out highly valued foreign pottery and locally made obsidian blades that they alone could provide. To ensure continued access to such generally needed items, subordinates helped feed their leaders and worked on their building projects, including the temples and palaces in the La Sierra site core. Some of the food pouring into La ­Sierra’s coffers was diverted to support a small but very busy force of artisans who made blades and worked conch. Shell blanks, in turn, were traded out of the valley to get more obsidian cores and polychrome pottery. And so this cycle of exchange, production, and consumption continued, to the great benefit of those at the top of the basin’s political hierarchy. The elites probably conducted public religious ceremonies at the capital. Some of these, such as rites associated with the ballcourt, were likely modeled on lowland Maya practices. Still, the real source of elite power was now seen as having derived from centralized control over the acquisition, production, and distribution of a limited set of very important commodities. Note that in the process of formulating this new hypothesis we modified some of PGT’s basic precepts. Obsidian blades were not, as far as we could tell, purely social valuables. These implements had real economic significance in addition to their social meaning. It seemed likely, given their pervasiveness throughout the valley, that the use of blades as cutting tools was essential to the survival of all residents of the La Sierra realm. The term social valuable, therefore, was being stretched to accommodate a good whose circulation was probably not determined primarily by its role in defining interpersonal relations. Imported painted pottery, however, did arguably fit more comfortably within the PGT framework. The elaborate designs adorning these vessels almost certainly conveyed important social information, making them stand out from the far more common, simply decorated containers with, most probably, more purely utilitarian functions. By arguing that centralized control over the distribution of obsidian blades and imported polychrome vessels figured in the domination strategies of La Sierra’s elites, we were contending that these two different kinds of goods served similar political purposes (i.e., elevating elites by undermining household autonomy). We did not feel that it was essential to remain true to the details of PGT in order to use it in our investigations. Rather, we drew inspiration from this viewpoint even as we modified it to fit our purposes. Most of us alter some aspects of the theories we use in constructing hypotheses that are meant to apply to particular situations. This is one way in which theories change. It all made sense. What the previous inference to the best explanation could not account for was accommodated by PGT. Concepts such as Maya and non-Maya were rapidly receding in importance. It did not seem to matter whether goods came from Maya or non-Maya realms. The central issue was

Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory  123

how they were used within the valley to create and maintain elite power. The exploitation of commoners by elites that was part of the earlier model assumed center stage. We saw it as the dominant theme in relations among members of these social categories. Trade still played a role in understanding how one faction came to lord it over another. Our interest, however, had shifted to how imports were integrated in production, consumption, and distribution processes within the Late Classic Naco Valley. The trend toward emphasizing economic factors in our theory of Late Classic Naco Valley society was further developed here. This was an exciting time for us. New possibilities were becoming apparent as the blinders provided by older theories were forcibly removed. We really thought we were onto something novel. Making sense of Late Classic Naco Valley developments could be done by integrating economics and politics in ways that had not been considered seriously before in Southeast Mesoamerica. All that remained was to test the new hypothesis against more data. To do that we had to take crafts seriously.

Grappling with Crafts Evaluating the hypothesis derived from PGT occurred during the 1990 and 1991 seasons. The first was largely devoted to field investigations, while 3 months during 1991 were primarily spent analyzing the massive quantities of artifacts recovered during the preceding year. We concentrated research at La Sierra, where 1,578 m 2 of prehistoric deposits were excavated across seven different patio-focused structure groups. Our aim was to test for the existence of Late Classic workshops. If the hypothesis now being entertained was correct, additional research would uncover evidence of widespread participation in specialized production by La Sierra’s residents. Crafts pursued at the capital would, if we were on the right track, have been conducted at high levels of intensity, yielding surpluses beyond the needs of the manufacturers and their immediate households. If we were wrong, continued investigations would unearth no such evidence. Craft production had not been a concept used in our earlier hypotheses. Active recognition of its potential importance in understanding Late Classic Naco Valley political and economic life meant that we had to take account of it. This is easier said than done. The first step involved defining what we meant by craft production. Subsequent steps were dictated by efforts to come to terms with the implications of that definition. All of these efforts were conducted within the realm of middle-level and middle-range theory. Craftworking Defined Craft production is the fabrication of items by a segment of the total population with the intent of generating surpluses destined for exchange with those outside the producing group. The important point is that people are

124  Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory

fashioning items for exchange. Specialized production implies the existence of enduring social, economic, and political relations through which manufactured goods are transferred to others. These exchange relations can take various forms, from market transactions, to gifts, to redistribution of goods by rulers who collect them from artisans and then hand them out across entire cultures. Without such ties, in whatever shape they take, there is no point in making items for exchange in the first place. Our identification of craft-producing locales was based, therefore, on the variable distribution of debris, tools, and facilities associated with particular manufactures. Those markers of production processes that were universally, or nearly so, distributed among households were not identified as signs of specialized crafts. Grinding stones, used to convert grains such as corn into flour, are consistently found in small numbers within almost every investigated Late Classic Naco Valley patio group. This pattern suggests that all households processed their own food. Such widespread chores were not what elites might exclusively control and manipulate to advance their own interests. Only those manufacturing tasks whose material signatures were localized in a relatively few households were defined as crafts, though all evidence of production was recorded. Identifying Production In studies of craft production, as in all archaeological analyses, it helps to know what you are looking for. Identification of telltale craft residues presupposes some knowledge of the original manufacturing process. Many crafts pursued in antiquity, however, are no longer practiced and cannot be directly observed. This is especially the case in Southeast Mesoamerica where the indigenous descendants of prehistoric populations were largely wiped out by disease and slaving operations within a century of the Spanish Conquest. Most traces of their original cultures were lost by the nineteenth century. We therefore relied heavily on analogies drawn from other culture areas for recognizing crafts archaeologically. As our work progressed, we came to depend especially on the investigations of our colleagues working in middle-range theory (Chapter 1) who had been seeking recurring relations among production processes and their material remains. These investigations involved studying artisans in the present, and those recorded in historical documents, who engaged in production tasks that were also performed in prehistory. In addition, some researchers conducted experiments designed to replicate ancient production technologies. Middle-range theory of this sort is essential to research guided by all high-level theories. It is one way every one of us can test hypotheses about past behaviors from the physical remains of those actions. We saw immediately that not all types of manufacturing are easy to describe using archaeological data. Those that leave behind large amounts of distinctive, imperishable implements, facilities, and debris can be identified

Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory  125

with a relatively high degree of assurance. The conch fragments and the locally unusual chert tools found associated with them in 1988 are fairly clear markers of shell-blank fabrication. Similarly, polyhedral obsidian cores and chipping debris signal blade production. Perishable materials, such as feathers, are much harder to identify from surviving remains. Thus, we had to acknowledge that there likely were goods produced by La Sierra’s inhabitants that we had little chance of recognizing. Describing the Organization of Production If identifying ancient crafts is difficult, reconstructing the organization of production is even more daunting. Nonetheless, this is a challenge we had to face if we were to figure out the political significance of crafts in the Late Classic Naco Valley. In order to describe ancient manufacturing systems, it is important to identify their scale and intensity of production. Intensity refers to how much time artisans devote to pursuing their crafts. In general, this variable is described along a continuum stretching from part to full-time commitments to craftworking. Full-time artisans spend most of their working days practicing their profession, using the output thus produced to obtain goods they need to survive. These include food and tools they do not make. Part-timers fit craftworking around other chores, such as farming. They meet most of their own basic needs by their own efforts, using the exchange of craft goods to supplement what they can get on their own. The more fulltime specialists there are in an economy, the more mutual interdependence for essential goods there is among those participating in that economy. It is a fairly straightforward task to specify craftworking intensities among living people. Measuring this variable is a bit trickier in prehistoric contexts. Often, archaeologists fall back on lines of evidence that refer to skill levels in distinguishing full from part-time specialists. If the technology needed to produce a certain good is complicated to learn and requires considerable practice to maintain, then it was probably pursued by full-time specialists. Analogy is critical to assessing the skills needed to pursue certain crafts. These estimates are usually based on observations of artisans still employing those technologies or from experiments designed to replicate ancient manufacturing processes. As noted, the part-time/full-time distinction is more of a continuum than an either/or proposition. Still, the more complex the production steps in a craft are, the more likely that the individuals or groups performing them are devoting considerable parts of their workdays to these tasks. Production scale, or the volume of goods made during a certain interval, is often related to craftworking intensity. The more of a good produced in a specified period of time, the more likely it is that its manufacture is being pursued on a full-time basis. Once again, there is a problem. How do you reconstruct production volume from archaeological remains? To answer this question we relied on the density of manufacturing debris recovered from

126  Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory

a particular locale, the quantities of tools specific to the production process found in or near a workshop, and the sizes of facilities used to fashion the items in question. More and bigger imply greater volumes. Excavating in a variety of contexts at La Sierra, as we were, only made the situation more complicated. Most of the areas we dug were places where people lived. They might, as we learned, have also pursued crafts in their household compounds, but not always. Consider the case where the production tasks generated potentially troublesome debris, such as the sharp fragments of obsidian that flew off cores during the knapping process. Lacking heavy-duty, puncture-proof footwear, people probably found it wise to store valuable imported cores at home, where they could be protected, and make the blades elsewhere. As a result, we were using information that was not always sufficient to infer the degree to which households engaged in different crafts. In some cases, as in the obsidian industry, we could quantify the raw materials (those polyhedral cores) that were kept in residences, while in others we had a combination of tools and debris left from the actual manufacturing process (as was the case with shell working). Though we could still use these data to infer the presence and importance of different crafts in the lives of La Sierra’s households, we had to bear in mind differences in the nature of our information. Given these concerns, it was apparent that, as much as we strove to count and weigh debris and tools and measure facilities, the results would be subjective estimates of manufacturing volumes and intensities, estimates that are difficult to translate into concrete production figures. What does it mean that one patio group yielded 14 obsidian cores while another had only one? These figures could not be translated directly into precise numbers of blades fashioned per year or even clear statements about the full or part-time status of the artisans involved. We did feel, however, that we could say that blade fashioning was pursued more intensively and at larger scales at the locale where 14 cores were found than in its neighbor with only one, assuming that: 1) Comparable areas in both locales were excavated. 2) The samples from both were representative (i.e., that the amounts of ­debris and/or tools found closely approximated the total numbers of tools and debris originally present at those locations). 3) The deposits in question covered comparable time spans. We controlled for variations in the amount of area excavated by developing ratios of numbers of items found per m 2 dug within a patio group. This helped us measure the relative importance of the same craft in the economic activities of different households. Say, for example, that in one patio group we cleared 100 m 2 and found 10 obsidian cores, while in another we found 10 cores after uncovering only 50 m 2. The ratio of cores per m 2 comes out to 0.1 cores/m 2 and 0.2 cores/m 2, respectively. From this we might say that, if our samples are representative and encompass comparable periods of time, blade

Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory  127

knapping was a more significant activity in the second household than in the first. (We are content to use meters squared in these calculations rather than the volume of material removed [meters cubed] because clearing operations in the Naco Valley very seldom encountered layers of earth and fallen stone that were more than 50 cm deep.) It was difficult to control for the amount of time the soil strata containing production debris and tools had accumulated. We could assign deposits to particular phases, such as the Late Classic, based on artifact styles and, when we were lucky, Carbon14 dates. It was hard to say for how long during the three centuries of the Late Classic the recovered cores in this example had sat around. The thickness of deposits containing evidence of craft production can help in that the thicker the deposit, the longer it may have accumulated. This is not always the case, however, as some very deep deposits can collect in short periods as when people dump a lot of trash all at once after a feast. In confronting this very real problem, we made an end run. First, the Late Classic deposits we were dealing with at La Sierra were generally thin. About 50 cm separated modern ground level from ancient living surfaces associated with the last use of a building. This consistent pattern implied that the tools and debris associated with a craft conducted at the end of a household’s occupation had accumulated over relatively short and comparable periods of time. We also concluded that obsidian cores were valuable items and well taken care of until they were no longer useful. Therefore, the nuclei found in a patio group were likely those employed by its last Late Classic occupants over fairly restricted intervals. Detritus produced by shell working, because of its threat to tender human feet, would, we thought, not be allowed to accumulate for long before it became a real danger. Thus, regular removal of sharp shell and coral fragments from domestic areas meant that the debris we found had collected over fairly short spans near the end of a compound’s occupation. Since every household involved in these crafts faced the same concerns, the time obsidian cores and shell debris were allowed to collect would be about the same in each case. Are we sure about this? The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is that we had to start somewhere and these assumptions seemed a reasonable place to begin. There is still the problem of how representative our excavated samples were. If the debris, tools, and facilities associated with craft activities were uniformly spread around domestic groups, then digging the same proportions of two compounds would yield precisely comparable results. Unfortunately, the tools, facilities, and detritus of craft production might well be concentrated in a few spots within a patio group and could be missed in even the most thorough excavations. The vast majority of the shell-working debris found in all of La Sierra, for example, was concentrated within the 0.5 m 2 we happened upon in 1988. We could have dug in a great many places at the site and missed that one spot. We therefore do not know if our excavations in different patio groups yielded comparable evidence for crafts. The more we dug in a particular building cluster, the more certain we are that the evidence

128  Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory

accurately represents the presence, intensity, and scale of craft production conducted in that compound during the Late Classic. Additional excavations in any structure group might change the picture derived from completed studies. Archaeology is always a work in progress. Summary We were fairly confident that we could infer what crafts were being pursued at Late Classic La Sierra, assuming that those manufacturing processes left behind durable material remains. Specifying exactly how much product was generated by artisans in any given period or where precisely along the full to part-time continuum these craftworkers fell was beyond us. Instead, we opted to compare the relative intensities and scales of craft production across households in Late Classic La Sierra, distinguishing different degrees of commitment to craft production among domestic units. The more debris or tools found per excavated m 2 within a household compound, and the higher the skill requirements of the crafts in question, the more heavily committed a domestic unit was to a specific craft. The result is a sliding scale of manufacturing volume and intensity.

Evaluating the Hypothesis, 1990–1991 After pondering the nature of crafts and puzzling out ways to assess manufacturing intensity and scale using multiple lines of evidence, we felt ready to evaluate the latest hypothesis. We were, in fact, prepared to look for evidence of shell-blank and obsidian-blade production. There was more at La Sierra than our theory led us to expect. Blades and Shell By the conclusion of the 1991 field season we were taken aback. Not only had we encountered additional evidence of obsidian blade knapping at La ­Sierra, but it seemed that the occupants of just about every patio group at the capital, outside the site core, were engaged in this craft. Commitment to blade fabrication varied. Excavations at one structure group in southern La Sierra yielded 70  polyhedral nuclei, pointing to the presence of artisans fashioning large quantities of blades here (0.4 cores/m 2; a description of these investigations can be found here: https://digital.kenyon.edu/honduras/27904/). Digging at an additional five La Sierra compounds (70 percent of those extensively cleared at the capital from 1988 to 1990) yielded between two to 14 nuclei, suggestive of a more moderate involvement in the craft (0.01–0.1 cores/m 2). Despite these differences in production scales, La Sierra was emerging as a center whose business was obsidian. As only one polyhedral core was then known from rural portions of the valley, households residing beyond the capital were shaping up as consumers of blades fashioned under elite control.

Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory  129

Since blade knapping takes considerable skill, we reasoned that at least some of La Sierra’s households harbored specialists who devoted most of their productive efforts to working obsidian. They may not have been full-time specialists, but making blades seems to have been very significant in ensuring their livelihoods. On the other hand, patio groups where relatively few cores were found may have included people who were less committed to, and not as economically dependent on, this trade. Once again, there was apparently a sliding scale in production intensity and volume across La Sierra’s Late Classic domestic groups. Similarly, just because there was a very productive knapper in a household did not mean that all members of the domestic group were involved in this task to equal degrees, if at all. In fact, it became clear that participants in several households were pursuing multiple specialties. This, too, took us unawares. Evidence for the working of marine shell and coral was localized at the patio group where it was first identified in 1988 (0.5 shell and coral fragments/m 2). Such quantities of debris and implements, coupled with the skill required to cut shell and coral, led us to believe that this was a task pursued by full-time artisans who generated considerable quantities of artifact blanks. They were largely alone in this pursuit, as similar implements and shell ­detritus were rarely found elsewhere. The second largest shell deposit was dated to an earlier period in the same household, while a third, smaller deposit was buried under the floor of a building at La Sierra that dated to late in the Late Classic. Much as we had expected, therefore, fabrication of shell blanks was seemingly kept under strict centralized control. Obsidian cores, marine shell, and coral all came from distant sources. Most likely, the last two were obtained from residents of the Caribbean coast 35 km to the north. The majority of the obsidian derived from the Ixtepeque flows in eastern Guatemala, roughly 200 km to the southwest. In keeping with the earlier trade model, we presumed that valley rulers acquired these goods. What we had not imagined prior to 1988 was that these acquisitions were used to fuel a thriving craft economy in the basin. Cloth and Ceramic Effigies Evidence for cloth decoration and the fashioning of fired clay figurines and musical instruments also came to light in excavated La Sierra compounds. Textiles, especially elaborately decorated examples, frequently served as social valuables in many cultures throughout antiquity. For example, in Mesopotamia from at least 3500 BC onward, the finest cloth was given as gifts to the gods and used as a badge of high rank. We were therefore alert to the possibility that well-made textiles served the same purposes in the Naco Valley. One artifact we think was associated with cloth decoration is the ceramic stamp (Figure 6.1). The flat face of each stamp bears motifs that were deeply engraved or molded into its surface prior to firing. Traces of paint are sometimes preserved in the design’s deep recesses. Recognized motifs

130  Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory

include everything from naturalistic renditions of animals to figures composed of ­human and non-human elements to purely geometric designs. The stamp’s back usually bears a conical protrusion that was grasped while holding the implement. Available evidence suggests that stamps were dipped into paint and used to decorate clothing. Limited variation in the frequency of stamps across several excavated compounds (0.05–0.08 stamps/m 2) implies that domestic groups at Late Classic La Sierra differed relatively little in their commitment to tasks involving this implement. Based on historic and ethnographic analogies, it did not seem that cloth decoration was particularly time-consuming or that it required considerable skill. This craft therefore seemed to fall at the part-time end of the intensity continuum and was characterized by modest production scales. The presence of ceramic spindle whorls in deposits indicated participation in a different aspect of textile production. Whorls are, in Mesoamerica, round objects either made purposefully for the task or fashioned from broken pottery vessels. The holes in their centers are used to hold a stick, called the spindle. Thread is produced by gathering raw cotton in a ball, attaching one end to the spindle, twisting the fiber to start the thread, and then dropping the weighted spindle, making sure it is turning so that the raw cotton is twisted into thread. The whorl is the weight. Spindle whorls are spread throughout households, so this might also be a task that was pursued on a part-time basis. Ceramic figurines, whistles, and ocarinas are miniature renditions of ­humans, animals, or some combination of the two (Figures 6.2 and 6.3). Whistles and ocarinas are musical instruments distinguished from figurines by the one or more sounding chambers added to the backs of the figurative portion. Whistles sound a single note when blown into, but the multiple holes in ocarinas afford a greater musical range. Figurines, whistles, and ocarinas are generally thought to be paraphernalia employed in the conduct of

Figure 6.1  Examples of ceramic stamps likely used in cloth decoration.

Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory  131

small-scale rituals pursued within ancient households. All three of these artifacts were made using fired clay molds into which the wet clay was pressed during the manufacturing process (Figure 6.4). Recovery of these molds from specific locations signaled involvement of a household in fashioning figurines, whistles, and/or ocarinas. Variations in mold frequencies among patio groups at La Sierra were noted (0.004–0.01 pieces/m 2), suggesting, once again, that households were differentially involved in this craft. As to skill level, making figurines is fairly easy. At minimum, fashioning a figurine mold requires taking an existing figurine, pressing the decorated part into wet clay, and then letting the new mold dry. The mold can then be fired. Making a new design is more difficult. The ­artisan first sculpts the form, using the fabricated piece to make the mold. Whistles and ocarinas are another matter. In making a whistle, shaping the sounding chamber and attaching it to the figurative element adds at least two extra steps. Creating ocarinas is a much more complex process. Simple ocarinas have a single chamber, and a mouthpiece like a whistle. The difference

Figure 6.2  E  xample of a ceramic figurine.

132  Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory

Figure 6.3  Example of a ceramic ocarina; the rear sounding chamber has broken off.

Figure 6.4  E  xample of a mold used to make figurines.

is in puncturing the sounding chamber to make playing holes. The several playing holes make possible the production of multiple notes, as the holes can be covered and exposed in sequence while blowing into the mouthpiece. Multiple-chamber ocarinas are even more difficult to make. These

Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory  133

have several interconnected sounding chambers with one or two fingering holes per chamber. The mouthpieces are also different. Whereas whistles and single-chamber ocarinas have mouthpieces like modern whistles, multi-­ chamber ocarinas are played by blowing over an open mouthpiece much like that of a modern flute. To make the more complex ocarinas requires more technical knowledge than that needed to form figurines and whistles. In addition, a fair amount of coordinated effort by several people is required to manufacture ocarinas. In no case, however, would much time be needed in fashioning any of these items. Manufacturing figurines, whistles, and ocarinas probably could be pursued on a part-time basis. The skills seem to be easy to learn and could be maintained with relatively little practice. This is especially true for figurines, somewhat less so for whistles and ocarinas. Pottery Manufacturing The biggest surprise, however, was the identification of large-scale facilities for making ceramic vessels on La Sierra’s northern outskirts. There was nothing in our previous experience in Southeast Mesoamerica that prepared us for this discovery. In large part, this was because most Precolumbian pottery manufacture was thought to have been a low-volume domestic affair, individuals casually fabricating a few pots as these were needed, using simple technologies that left few archaeological traces. This had been the experience of just about all of those investigators working in southern Mesoamerica, including scholars doing research in the Maya lowlands where ceramic production facilities, the relevant tools, and manufacturing debris had rarely been recovered by this time. A prehistoric ceramic kiln was unearthed in the Sula Plain on Honduras’ north coast in the early twentieth century. No comparable remains had been found in the five decades since that discovery. Like most finds that do not match prevailing expectations, this information was so out of step with generally accepted theoretical positions that it was ignored and largely forgotten. Consequently, our clearing of an unprepossessing platform on La Sierra’s northern margin took on the nature of farce (you can read about the investigations conducted in this workshop during the 1990 field season here: http://digital.kenyon.edu/honduras/21487). Chosen for study because it represented the small end of the structure– size continuum in this area, the building in question posed problems from the start. The quantities of pottery sherds found during the initial digging seemed unusually large by local standards (354 sherds/m 2 were unearthed here). To make matters worse, the building’s facings—walls designed to retain platform fill—failed to run straight and had a maddening tendency to curve. The large quantities of burnt daub (also called bajareque)—clay used in constructing superstructures raised atop stone-faced platforms—­ unearthed within the structure had unusual forms, indicating that the perishable structure was dome-shaped. After a week of denial, we admitted that what we had mapped during survey as a low, rectangular platform was,

134  Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory

in fact, a stone-lined circle whose massive (1.5–2 m thick) walls enclosed a central open space with a diameter of 2.8 m (Figure 6.5). A domed superstructure built of clay applied over a stick framework was raised above these circular foundations. Evidence of considerable burning within the structure’s core, the presence of two stone-lined vents piercing opposite sides of the rock-walled circle, the large quantities of pottery fragments recovered off its flanks, and the ash deposits within and outside the circle strongly implied that this was not a residence. Instead, it looked like a very large pottery kiln, similar to firing facilities reported from other parts of the world but not found in recent investigations within Southeast Mesoamerica. The building did resemble that earlier kiln reported from the Sula Plain in form if not in size. Recognition of the kiln did not come easily to us. As much as we had anticipated finding evidence of craft production at La Sierra, we did not expect

Figure 6.5  P  lan drawing of the pottery kiln unearthed in northern La Sierra during 1990.

Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory  135

this kind of firing facility. Discovery of the kiln did open up new vistas. One of La Sierra’s distinctive features that we had long noted was its position on top of an extensive clay deposit lying just below ground surface. We had often passed by a small factory southwest of the center where people were busily mining this clay to make roof tiles. We had driven into, and cursed at, the sticky clay that entrapped our vehicles after heavy rains. In short, we knew that the clay was there but thought little of it except when we had to extricate the truck from its clutches. The discovery of the kiln changed all that. Suddenly it was terribly significant that La Sierra was sitting on so much clay. Test pits were dug along transects emanating from La Sierra’s center to evaluate the deposit’s extent, this work eventually determining that the clay spread out in all directions for roughly 220 m beyond the capital’s constructions. Why all this concern with clay? If La Sierra was a center of high-volume pottery production, as implied by the recovery of the kiln, then its residents would likely choose to live and work near the bulkiest, hardest-to-move component in the ceramic-making process—namely, clay. Now we could see why La Sierra was situated where it was. The easily accessible clay surrounding the capital could fuel the pottery industry. In addition, a small stream had once coursed through the site, making water easy to get—and potting requires lots of water. Our attention also turned to five extensive depressions that we had mapped but otherwise ignored within La Sierra. One of these basin-shaped areas lay within 70 m southwest of the newly discovered kiln. What had previously seemed inconsequential features of the landscape now started to look like the partially filled-in remains of holes dug to extract clay for pottery manufacture. By the time all of this registered, the 1990 field season was drawing to a close and money was becoming more precious as its quantity diminished daily. We were only able, therefore, to dig a series of 18 test pits across the depression closest to the kiln to try to determine its original size and when it was originally excavated. The results suggested a Late Classic date for clay mining. This extended discussion of the kiln is meant to demonstrate a very simple point. There is a lot to see at any archaeological site but we only assign meaning to, and so truly perceive, that which makes sense. What we genuinely observe are those entities that conform to what we expect to find, and these expectations derive, in part, from the theories we bring with us to the work. Ceramic firing facilities, especially those designed to turn out large quantities of vessels, were not supposed to be found in prehistoric Southeast Mesoamerican sites. Despite all the changes in our guiding theory, we still unconsciously clung to this belief rooted in culture historical notions concerning the nature of indigenous ceramic production in southern Mesoamerica. The significance of the curved stone walls, domed superstructure, proximity of La Sierra to clay, and all those odd depressions were therefore not initially recognized. Once one element in this puzzle finally muscled its way into our

136  Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory

consciousness, however, the others started demanding attention. Sites are full of material patterns, many of which remain implicit until we are forced to look at and acknowledge them. These formerly invisible arrangements are often important sources of new information. Theories can help us see and make sense of such patterns or hide them from view. The new insights were exciting, but we still faced a major problem. There was relatively little information available on the kiln firing of ceramics in southern Mesoamerica. Lacking a body of studies comparable to those dealing with fashioning obsidian blades and shell artifacts, we needed to establish a firmer basis for interpreting La Sierra’s ceramic industry. This would depend on tapping new lines of evidence to infer the importance and structure of pottery manufacture within the political economy focused on Late Classic La Sierra. The extent to which La Sierra’s artisans blanketed the Late Classic Naco Valley pottery market was in part addressed through instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) of ceramic and clay samples drawn from Late Classic sites throughout the basin, including the capital. Clays from different deposits sometimes contain varying amounts of particular minerals and chemical elements. Pottery vessels made from these materials may retain the distinctive mineral–chemical signatures of their parent sources. INAA helps to reveal these mineral–chemical profiles, allowing researchers to match particular vessels, or sherds, to known clay deposits. As of this writing we are still pursuing these investigations. To progress further, we pursued our own research within middle-range theory. Ethnoarchaeological studies were initiated during 1991 to facilitate recognition of ancient pottery-producing areas and to enhance assessments of manufacturing scales and skills. A survey was conducted among contemporary potters in the Naco Valley as part of this effort. The research, conducted by Sam Connell, involved observing and talking with people who worked in large-scale concerns turning out roof tiles and figurines. In addition, we interviewed members of that fast-dwindling portion of the population who still fashioned pottery vessels in small numbers for their own use and sale. Evaluations of local clay qualities, and the appropriateness of different clays for fabricating diverse finished products, were elicited in the course of these investigations. Detailed information on the material remains left behind by pottery production conducted at different scales was also gathered. The ethnoarchaeological work was supplemented by a survey designed to look for clay deposits. This work identified dozens of good clay sources scattered across the valley, but none is as large or of as high quality as that underlying La Sierra. We do not assume that modern potters are direct cultural heirs of Late Classic Naco Valley artisans. There have been too many disjunctions during the valley’s long prehistory and history to make such a claim. Contemporary behaviors, therefore, are examined because certain features involved in fashioning pottery vessels by hand are so thoroughly conditioned by technology

Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory  137

and the nature of the raw materials used that they transcend cultural and temporal differences. Potters working in the Naco Valley during all periods would, by this argument, have assessed the quality of available clays and structured their production activities in generally similar ways. Subsequent work, directed by Ben Carter in 1996, built on this foundation and focused on constructing replicas of Late Classic kilns. Here the goal was to get a rough idea of the effort invested in raising these facilities, temperatures achievable within them, production volumes of kilns with different dimensions, and the material remains left after a kiln collapses. All of these efforts have gone a long way toward establishing a foundation for identifying ceramic production locales and reconstructing manufacturing volumes and intensities. They have also helped us make sense of material patterns seen in the archaeological record and to predict better where additional pottery-­ producing sites might be found. This research would never have been pursued if we had not come across that initial kiln. By the end of the 1991 field season, we knew that people were making pottery at Late Classic La Sierra. The size of the kiln, coupled with the large quantities of sherds unearthed in its vicinity, hinted at the production of vessels on a large scale. This inference was supported by later replicative studies in which we learned that a kiln of this size could have been used to fire, minimally, 150 sizable ceramic containers at once. Pottery making need not require great technological sophistication, but building and using a kiln indicate significant knowledge about the firing process and skill in controlling firing temperatures and oxygen flows. In fact, La Sierra’s Late Classic potters seemed to have made a relatively simple job of ceramic firing into a complex process. We presumed that they did this to increase production quality and scale in order to provide a wide array of pots to all residents of the Late Classic Naco Valley.

Where We Stood in 1991 We were very happy at the conclusion of the 1991 field season. Our new hypothesis based on PGT worked. Using it as a guide, we had successfully predicted the existence of large-scale workshops at La Sierra. The valley’s paramount lords, it seemed, used their exclusive control over the acquisition, production, and local distribution of a wide range of locally made and foreign products to capture the rest of the population in webs of dependency. By manipulating economic relations, La Sierra’s rulers acquired the power manifest in the comparatively great size of their capital. Supporters were enticed to move to the center by the prospect of enhancing their access to valued commodities obtainable only from elites. Once there, some commoners could take advantage of the opportunity to pursue a craft supported by the patronage of powerful nobles, the ultimate suppliers of such valuable raw materials as obsidian cores. Threat of exclusion from the network by which foreign pottery, obsidian blades, decorated cloth, ceramic figurines,

138  Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory

whistles, ocarinas, and locally made pottery vessels moved from elites to subordinates within the valley was probably enough to keep most people in line. It is important to bear in mind that we arrived at this latest of our inferences to the best explanation through a process in which changes in theory and the accumulation of new data were tightly related. Experiences we had conducting research within the middle Ulua drainage led us to reconsider the relevance of WST to our work. Applying hypotheses based on this conceptual framework during the 1988 investigations at La Sierra generated findings that did not fit comfortably within a WST-based approach. With the help of others, we identified PGT as a more promising source of hypotheses that could explain events within the Late Classic Naco Valley. Data that we collected during 1990 and 1991 seemingly confirmed those hypotheses, resulting in the inference to the best explanation outlined here. Evaluating the utility of hypotheses in understanding the past, therefore, involves the interplay among: 1) the data found; 2) the theories available for generating testable explanations about that data; and 3) what the researcher thinks about the relevance of specific theories to particular data sets. Changes in any one of these factors can lead to shifts in what investigators see as a “best explanation” of the past.

The Naco Valley, AD 825—as of the Early 1990s Life in the Late Classic Naco Valley looked quite different in 1991 than it had in 1979. The serenity of an area whose members lived peacefully with one another and where differences in rank were muted by the ability of each household to meet its own economic needs by its own efforts was now shattered. In its place, we perceived a situation where rulers exercised great power over their followers. Paramount elites moved effectively to exclude other valley denizens from participation in inter-societal transactions by making sure that they alone controlled the acquisition and fashioning of commodities (such as shell blanks) prized by social leaders in other realms. In return for processed exotic shell (and, presumably, other items), La Sierra’s aristocrats secured imports that were highly esteemed within the basin. Some of these goods arrived in finished form (elaborately decorated pottery vessels) while others required additional, highly skilled work to complete (obsidian blades). In the latter case, rulers concentrated craftworkers possessing the needed talents at the capital where they knapped blades under elite supervision, supported by elite patronage. Imported pottery containers and obsidian blades were widely distributed among people of all ranks within

Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory  139

the Naco Valley but were available only from La Sierra’s power-holders. These patterns strongly suggested that Late Classic valley residents relied on their rulers for goods that they needed (or thought they did) but could not produce themselves. Such dependency put the majority at the mercy of the minority. Not content with monopolizing the flow of imports into and within the valley, La Sierra’s leaders also moved to control the production of decorated cloth and ceramic artifacts, the latter using locally abundant clays and a sophisticated firing procedure involving at least one large kiln. Both prosaic goods (pottery vessels) and those associated with the sacred realm (figurines, whistles, and ocarinas) were fabricated at the center for dispersal throughout the basin (we were not sure where stamped cloth fit into this sacred/profane continuum). Local raw materials and the technologies needed to transform them into finished items were also part of elite domination strategies. All of the goods made at La Sierra were fragile. That is, they were likely to wear out or break in a relatively short period of time. Obsidian blades dulled from frequent use, pots and figurines fractured, and cloth frayed. This fragility ensured a constant, fairly high demand for the output of La Sierra’s workshops. Commoners could not easily hoard blades, dragging their feet in meeting elite demands until their stash of tools and other objects ran low. They were compelled, instead, to react smartly to decrees from rulers as there was always a shortage of essential items made under the auspices of paramount lords. Commoners, trapped in a web of economic obligations centered on their rulers, gave up some of their crops and worked on construction projects in La Sierra’s site core in return for these needed objects. Many left their natal homes and resettled at the capital, lured there by the prospect of enhanced opportunities to accumulate more valuables. Once at the center, subordinates were subject to heightened supervision and were less able to avoid meeting their obligations to La Sierra’s notables than they had been in rural areas. Representatives of distant lands were regular visitors to La Sierra. They brought with them gifts of pottery, obsidian, and, presumably, other (perishable) goods, and left laden with shell, perhaps some coral, and, maybe, cloth decorated by artisans using Naco’s distinctive line of stamps. Figurines, whistles, and ocarinas also may have been of interest to outsiders. Potentates from such lowland Maya centers as Copán and, possibly, Quiriguá would have recognized La Sierra’s ballcourt as an appropriate symbol of elite power. Otherwise, they found little that reminded them of their home capitals. Such discrepancies might have given rise to the occasional snide comment about the sophistication of the Naco Valley’s denizens and their leaders. Visitors from other areas would likely have been careful to keep such observations to themselves for fear of offending an important trade partner. As powerful as the lords of Copán and Quiriguá might have been, they did not dictate

140  Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory

terms of exchange to ancient Naqueños. Leaders of all these realms brought to their interactions something(s) that the others needed and they dealt with one another as equals whenever they met to trade. The Late Classic Naco Valley was, therefore, a vital place where competing interests intersected on a daily basis whenever rulers gave gifts to followers and followers went to work for, pledged loyalty and surrendered food to, rulers. Foreigners, if not a common sight at the capital, were regular visitors. The goods they brought and received fueled an economy that served the political ambitions of La Sierra’s elites. This place was anything but boring.

7 Practicing Power Over Time

The 1992–1996 investigations were designed to evaluate our evolving theory concerning relations among power, wealth, and craft production in the Late Classic Naco Valley. Pursuing this topic raised several important issues that we had not appreciated earlier. Specifically, the 1992–1996 research highlighted questions of: 1) rural commoner participation in specialized manufacture; 2) changes over time among measures of wealth, power, and craft production at all sites; and 3) the ways in which political structures can arise from the ground up out of numerous interpersonal interactions. In previous field seasons, we thought of ancient political economies as having been shaped by broad, rather impersonal processes of domination. After 1996, we began to wonder if ancient life in the Naco Valley had really been that simple. This disquiet depended on three major developments: a. Evidence for craftworking was found outside La Sierra. b. We realized that the “long Late Classic” was, in fact, divisible into two ­periods, over which political and economic relations changed dramatically. c. We became aware of the relevance of practice theory to our work. These “epiphanies” and their consequences for the conduct of our studies are outlined in this chapter.

Hypothesis Testing Continues Everything was clear and fine by the end of the 1991 field season. Maybe it was time to move on to a new area. Nagging doubts still plagued us, however. Our understanding of rural material and behavior patterns was largely based on limited excavations. These probes were in no way comparable to the more extensive exposures cleared at La Sierra and sites in its immediate environs. Fully 2,729 m 2 had been dug at La Sierra by 1990, an additional

142  Practicing Power Over Time

1,151 m 2 of Late Classic deposits were unearthed in that center’s near periphery within 1 km of the capital, but only 592 m 2 were exposed in all of the rural zone. At the very least, we had to admit that our chances of identifying evidence of craft production were much greater at La Sierra than anywhere else in the valley if only because we had cleared so much more of that site. Such research biases might have made La Sierra look like an industrial center. Happy as we were with the prestige goods theory-based hypothesis, therefore, we had to test it against data gathered from comparably broad exposures dug at sites elsewhere in the Naco Valley. That is what we set out to do in 1992 and 1995–1996. Operating under our guiding theory, we expected that more work among rural settlements would unearth evidence that their residents used goods made at La Sierra but did not manufacture these items. To ensure that our excavated sample of hinterland sites was as representative of general rural behavioral and material patterns as possible, we chose to excavate at Late Classic settlements of all sizes and locations within the valley. By this point we had surveyed over 95% of the basin and so had quite a few sites to choose from. Variations in the numbers and dimensions of buildings at settlements might relate significantly to differences in the types of crafts pursued by their residents and the scales at which these were conducted. Along the same lines, artisans likely chose to live near those raw materials that were essential to the pursuit of their craft. Sites located in different parts of the valley, near different sets of resources, could, therefore, have been homes to distinct sets of craftworkers. Frankly, we did not think that either of these considerations would prove to be significant. They were possibilities that had to be considered, if only to be rejected. Overall, 5,717 m 2 were dug in and around Late Classic structures distributed among 26 rural sites during 1992–1996. An additional 2,608 m 2 were excavated at La Sierra during 1995–1996 to gain a clearer sense of manufacturing processes there.

Crafting in the Hinterland It did not take long for our hypothesis to fall victim to an influx of data. No sooner had we begun excavations in 1992 than evidence for craft production began coming out of Late Classic rural settlements of all sizes. We initially tried consoling ourselves with the notion that artisans outside the capital fashioned goods at very low volumes. Maybe a few people occasionally turned their hands to fabricating a couple of figurines. Even so, they certainly still depended on La Sierra’s workshops to make up the difference between what they could make and what they needed. That hopeful fiction did not survive confrontation with the 29 figurine molds retrieved from excavations at Site 337 in the northwestern valley (0.2 mold fragments/m 2; you can read about investigations at that site here: http://digital.kenyon.edu/ honduras/4917). It was highly unlikely that the occupants of the three low platforms found at this settlement used all of the objects produced in these

Practicing Power Over Time  143

molds. No other patio group within or outside La Sierra came close to yielding this many molds. Clearly, Site 337’s residents were generating fairly large surpluses that were being exchanged with others. There was no evidence that either the manufacturing process or the transactions by which the goods left Site 337 were under paramount elite control (La Sierra is 7.3 km southeast of this settlement). We eventually acknowledged that almost all of the extensively cleared hinterland settlements investigated during 1992–1996 yielded some evidence of craft production, strongly suggesting widespread participation in specialized manufacture. Commitment to these tasks was not uniform, however. Site 337’s occupants, for example, apparently put together figurines, and/or ocarinas and whistles, in numbers far beyond those needed to meet their own requirements. Digging at Site 335, a settlement comparable in size to, and 250 m southeast of, Site 337, revealed no hint of figurine production. There was evidence, in the form of several unfinished examples, that people were making stone adze blades here (Figure 7.1). These implements, found in small numbers at Late Classic sites throughout the valley, were an important part of tool kits used in woodworking (you can read about the investigations at this site here: http://digital.kenyon.edu/hondurasreports). Such complementarity in production may have been the basis for economic relations among residents of different Late Classic Naco Valley households. In this view, members of particular domestic units specialized in fashioning certain goods that were then exchanged with others engaged in different economic pursuits. Most of these transactions seem to have occurred outside the purview of La Sierra’s rulers. Instead, they were apparently handled on the local level through arrangements worked out among members of individual households.

Figure 7.1  A sample of stone adze blades, or hachas.

144  Practicing Power Over Time

Commoners, it appeared, were meeting at least some of their own needs through their own efforts. Those they could not satisfy by themselves were addressed through exchanges with their peers. What were the implications of these findings for our understanding of the Naco Valley’s Late Classic political economy? Addressing that question required that we deal with another interpretive wrinkle, this one in time.

Change Over Time and a Return to Chronology The temporal sequence we had been working with since the 1970s outlined large blocks of years (phases) based on perceived changes in material styles, primarily the decoration of pottery vessels. Every subsequent field season saw refinement in that chronology. The phase most seriously modified by these efforts is the Late Classic. Originally it was divided into two intervals, Periods 6A and 6B (Chapter 3). This distinction remained unclear through the 1992 field seasons. Consequently, we could rarely distinguish deposits dating to these phases nor was it obvious what the sociopolitical implications of this division were. As a result, we tended to view the Late Classic as one phase that spanned three centuries. The 1995–1996 studies brought this issue back to the fore. The materials studied in those years allowed us to subdivide the “long Late Classic” into two phases: the Late Classic (AD 600–800) and the Terminal Classic (AD 800–1000). This distinction results from our greater appreciation of subtle shifts in artifact styles occurring within a general framework of persistent occupation at sites spanning these 400 years. (The new phases did not correspond to 6A and B.) As we noted before, ancient Naqueños frequently recycled trash deposits, using these as fill in later platforms. Consequently, the deep middens covering long time periods that are so dear to the hearts of c­ hronology-builders continued to elude us. What we did encounter, however, were more and more examples of building reuse and renovation. Some of these modifications buried artifact deposits associated with earlier versions of a construction. It was possible, therefore, to identify artifact styles linked to different periods of a structure’s use. In this way, we finally solidified the distinction between the Late and Terminal Classic. Because the stylistic shifts between these two intervals are subtle, their importance did not become clear until we had analyzed quite a few artifacts associated with different periods of occupation at many buildings. This division, based on changes in artifact styles and stratigraphic relations, was confirmed by Carbon14 assays of burnt organic material that was occasionally found with the analyzed artifacts. Our inferences were also encouraged and supported by the work of colleagues in neighboring areas. Rosemary Joyce (see Box 7.1), for example, had identified a Terminal Classic phase in the Sula Plain, about 15 km northeast of where we were working. The artifact styles that mark the Terminal Classic in the Sula Plain are different from Naco Valley styles. Still, Joyce’s

Practicing Power Over Time  145 Box 7.1  Rosemary Joyce Rosemary Joyce began conducting research in Southeast Mesoamerica in 1977 and continues to do so now. She has directed investigations dealing with time periods ranging from 1600 BC to the colonial period throughout northern Honduras. Joyce, in fact, worked with John ­Henderson and the authors in the Naco Valley in 1977, contributing to the early survey and excavation program in rural portions of the basin. She is also one of the leading proponents in Mesoamerica of approaches to the past that stress the ways in which people actively deployed material culture in efforts to establish a sense of themselves and their relations with others. In the process of developing these ideas, Joyce has promoted a vision of past societies as internally heterogeneous. She has paid special, though not exclusive, attention to how gender contributes to the varied ways people use material items in understanding and taking part in their cultures. Consequently, Joyce’s writings have significantly challenged culture historical and processual views of cultures as homogenous, or at least internally balanced, wholes unmarred by internal dissension. Her influence extends well beyond Mesoamerica.

definition of this phase alerted us to the possible existence of a Terminal Classic period in the Naco Valley. The Terminal Classic phase was also emerging from studies at sites in the adjacent Maya lowlands. All of this work pointed out that earlier understandings of the Late Classic in southern Mesoamerica were oversimplified. Instead, significant changes marked this interval, especially during the ninth through tenth centuries. These developments further strengthened our appreciation for a comparable period of major change in the Naco Valley.

Changing Power Relations in the Naco Valley and Beyond How did such chronological refinements affect our interpretations of political and economic processes? We had earlier succumbed to the tendency, common in archaeology, to view every site or deposit assigned to a particular phase as precisely contemporary. All settlements dated to the Late Classic in the basin were thus treated as though they had been occupied simultaneously. Every part of a large site, like La Sierra, that was assigned to the Late Classic was also thought to have been in use at the same moment and throughout roughly 300 years. This was much the same problem faced by early students of Stonehenge before changes in the arrangement of

146  Practicing Power Over Time

features at that monument were recognized (Chapter 13). Such propositions in all cases convey an improbably static view of the past. According to this perspective, major cultural changes are concentrated during the relatively brief transitions that mark the boundaries between phases. Once these shifts have occurred, the political and economic structures they produce remain more-or-less constant until the next major period. The point is that we had compressed a variety of different events strung out over long spans of time into one static image. Changes in Form and Power at La Sierra As with all such realizations (for us), the recognition that something was amiss took a while. Earlier work in La Sierra’s site core (Figure 2.5) suggested that some of the largest edifices, those located in the westernmost monumental plaza along with constructions making up the ballcourt, had been systematically stripped of their masonry facings in antiquity. Cut blocks survived in these cases only on the bottom-most terraces where they were probably accidentally hidden from the vandals by rock fall and soil accumulation. We knew this was the case for several large platforms. What we did not realize was how widespread the pattern was. Excavation in 1995–1996 of four massive constructions in La Sierra’s western site core revealed similar results (you can read about these and earlier excavations in the site core here: http:// digital.kenyon.edu/hondurasreports). Now we had evidence that eight of the eleven investigated buildings from the same area were missing large portions of their facades. Digging throughout La Sierra in 1995–1996 revealed that the recycled blocks showed up in buildings of all sizes, often mixed with the more commonly used river cobbles in platform facings (Figure 7.2). Again, we had seen these cut blocks in structure facades before but had not linked their appearance to the dismantling of site core platforms.

Figure 7.2  E  xamples of faced stone blocks reused in Terminal Classic constructions at La Sierra.

Practicing Power Over Time  147

What we finally came to realize was that there had been a sequence of activities at La Sierra that went something like this: 1) The monumental edifices of the western site core were raised, probably in the seventh century. 2) Those buildings were abandoned around AD 800. 3) Large portions of most western site core platforms were dismantled. 4) Stones from those constructions were recycled into structures of all sizes built in the rest of the center. We were forced to recognize, therefore, that a good deal of the architecture at La Sierra was erected after the large buildings in the western site core were abandoned. This does not mean that all of La Sierra was built following the western site core’s demise. Many of the reused blocks were incorporated into late additions appended onto preexisting platforms. These were the same additions that had been so helpful in our recognition of Terminal Classic ceramic styles. Most of these constructions were probably first raised in the Late Classic, when La Sierra’s lords still ruled from their large residences, worshiped at their massive temples, and played ball in their court. In the subsequent Terminal Classic, people of all ranks continued to live at the capital after those monuments to elite power had been partially disassembled. What we had taken to be the unchanging form of La Sierra masked significant political shifts. Even as the above observations were being made, investigations of smaller La Sierra structures were reinforcing our appreciation for the changing face of the capital. For example, in 1995 we cleared three platforms that seemed, on the surface, to belong to the same patio group. During the course of this work we learned that one had been in an advanced state of decay while the other two were still being occupied and maintained. In another part of the capital, a substantial platform raised during the Late Classic was converted into a firing facility, possibly for making ceramics, during the Terminal Classic. All of these shifts indicated that centers of power, people, and production moved around within La Sierra during what we had previously seen as a single period. La Sierra, therefore, was not that different from most towns and cities. At any moment, some parts of it were thriving centers of commerce, politics, and population while others were falling into decline. We had come perilously close to ignoring that simple truism. Just as the changes in Stonehenge’s form discussed in Chapter 13 challenged archaeologists to account for shifts in the activities conducted there, our views of La Sierra and its history were altered when we realized how complex its history had been. The site clearly did not assume in one short period the shape and size we discerned on the surface, and then retain those basic features unmodified for centuries. Most importantly from our perspective, the transformations that were coming to light were related to changes in how power was wielded and by whom. If such volatility characterized the form and governance of La Sierra, what changes had we missed in rural areas?

148  Practicing Power Over Time

Changing Power Relations among Rural Populations Up to 1991, we had assumed that people in the Late Classic Naco Valley occupied different positions in a single structure of inequality. Most were downtrodden, while a few, those who monopolized certain crafts, did the treading. This may have been the case during the seventh and eighth centuries, and PGT still seemed to provide a good basis for explaining these developments. The abandonment and dismantling of La Sierra’s western core, however, suggested that in the Terminal Classic something different succeeded this monolithic hierarchical arrangement. There were several possibilities. Perhaps the majority of commoners rose up, threw off their oppressors, and then moved out of the capital. We knew this was not the case, as La Sierra remained a major population center right through the Terminal Classic. In fact, not only were there still people at the old capital, but they raised 13 large constructions around a sizable plaza immediately east of the Late Classic site core (Figure 2.5). Somebody still exercised power at La Sierra. In contrast to the Late Classic, however (when La Sierra’s rulers reigned supreme), in the Terminal Classic there were 12 other centers with monumental edifices. Three of them were in La Sierra’s Near Periphery, almost in sight of its Late Classic monumental core. Based on the premise that the power of elites was expressed, in part, through the sizes of the constructions they commissioned, this dispersion of large edifices spoke to the diffusion of power. We had previously seen such locales as homes to members of a lesser nobility who were subservient to paramount lords at the valley’s capital. Armed with the newly won ability to distinguish Late from Terminal Classic, our closer examination of the archaeological record at these sites and in parts of La Sierra now showed that most had risen to prominence in the latter period as La Sierra’s rulers were losing some of their power. Those who lived at these small centers were looking more and more like challengers to centralized rule rather than agents of it. La Sierra’s elites during the Terminal Classic, therefore, shared the political stage with other members of the aristocracy. What had been a hierarchy in which all valley residents owed allegiance to La Sierra’s overlords became, during the Terminal Classic, a heterarchy wherein a variety of political leaders had more or less equivalent power. Heterarchy, an idea originally advanced by Carole Crumley (see Box 7.2), generally defines situations where interpersonal relations are not organized within a single, overarching structure composed of clear, vertically arranged ranked divisions, such as elite and commoner classes. Instead, there may be multiple hierarchies operating according to different principles or a network of horizontally structured relations of interdependence and competition. This does not mean that everyone is equal. It does mean that people cannot be placed strictly in one structure of domination and subordination. We increasingly suspected that the Late Classic basin-wide hierarchy was succeeded in the Terminal Classic by shifting alliances and competitions among valley notables. No one of these elites held absolute dominion over the others. Understanding these changes required a shift in theory away from PGT. How was craft production implicated in this volatile situation? The widespread distribution of crafts attested to in our excavations seemed to signal a

Practicing Power Over Time  149 Box 7.2  Carole Crumley Carole Crumley is a pioneer in the archaeological study of ancient landscapes, or the many ways political, cultural, social, economic, and ecological variables are interrelated in shaping peoples’ relations to, and understandings of, the places where they live. Her more than three decades of research in Burgundy, France focuses on the interplay of these factors in affecting settlement forms and distributions, along with land use patterns, dating from the last centuries BC to the present. The importance of state intervention in influencing the decisions Burgundians have made concerning their use of, and relations to, the land has been an especially important theme pursued by members of this multi-­ disciplinary project. Crumley’s highly influential notion of heterarchy was developed as a way of imaging complexity in socio-political formations and their environmental relations in ways that did not presuppose a single, regional ordering of all people and institutions within one overarching hierarchy. Since first articulated by Crumley, the utility of heterarchy in describing variably decentralized political formations has been much debated. Today the term is finding increasing acceptance among researchers working in diverse world areas and time periods.

dispersal of specialized manufacture over time. During the Late Classic, La Sierra residents specialized in the manufacture of obsidian blades, ceramic vessels, figurines, whistles, ocarinas, hachas (the stone adze blades mentioned earlier), cloth, and blanks of conch and coral, as anticipated under the premises of PGT. Outside the capital, there is some evidence at this time for weaving, cloth decoration, and the fashioning of figurines, whistles, and ocarinas, as well as the shaping of grinding stones. By the Terminal Classic, crafts were more widely distributed throughout the basin, though they were still strongly represented within La Sierra. For example, pottery kilns remained concentrated at the old capital, and at least the one found in 1990 on the north edge of the center was used throughout the Terminal Classic. Nonetheless, ceramic vessels were now also being made within at least five other sites scattered throughout the basin. In addition, evidence for obsidian blade knapping, formerly restricted primarily to La Sierra, was recovered from seven Terminal Classic rural sites. There is no sign of declining participation in this craft at La Sierra or in its near periphery from the Late to Terminal Classic. The nuclei were still acquired from great distances, possibly by elites. Notables residing at different valley centers, however, may now have competed to obtain cores rather than relying on La Sierra’s rulers who had formerly monopolized such exchange networks. The number of sites with evidence for producing figurines, whistles, and ocarinas also rose, in this case from six (including La Sierra) in the Late Classic, to

150  Practicing Power Over Time

16 in the Terminal Classic. Variation in relative production scales grew as well. Nowhere were more than four molds found at any one site or patio group in the Late Classic, whereas in the Terminal Classic the numbers range from one to 21, the largest concentration coming from outside La Sierra at Site 337 (now dated to the Terminal Classic). Working cloth, marked by the distribution of spindle whorls used to spin thread, shows up at eight Terminal Classic settlements, up from four in the Late Classic. Manufacturing volumes and intensities everywhere seem low for this craft. Cloth decoration using ceramic stamps occurred at five sites in the Late Classic when the vast majority of stamps came from patio groups at La Sierra. By the Terminal Classic, residents of 14 sites were participating in cloth decoration, some at considerable scales (21 stamps were recovered from Terminal Classic Site 128 northwest of La Sierra; this number is surpassed only by the 26 examples from a La Sierra patio group). As power diffused from La Sierra, so too, it seems, did crafting. It may be that artisans were initially encouraged by Late Classic lords to take up production specialties and settle at the capital as a means of establishing a valley-wide hierarchy of political control, as specified in PGT. This strategy could have had the unintended consequence of encouraging some valley residents to pursue manufacturing tasks for which they had the necessary raw materials and skills. Using La Sierra’s workshops as models, different families might then have incorporated craft production into their daily rounds as a way of meeting their own needs and of obtaining goods from others engaged in different economic pursuits. Households at La Sierra were the most fully committed to this economic strategy during the Late Classic and continued to pursue it in the Terminal Classic. The decline of centralized rule apparently lifted any restrictions limiting households from participating in crafts. Specialized manufacturing then spread widely, to the point that nearly every household was engaged in at least one craft by the Terminal Classic’s conclusion. An Emerging Mosaic of Wealth, Power, and Occupation A major surprise was the subtle variation among rural settlements in the ways in which power and crafts were woven into people’s daily lives during the Terminal Classic. Detailed analyses of material patterning suggested that one consequence of the devolution of power during the Terminal Classic was increased variation within and among sites in the ways in which political economies were structured on very local levels. What follows are several examples that illustrate this diversity. Variation within Sites Site 128, a political center composed of 28 structures situated 5 km northwest of La Sierra, was originally interpreted as an administrative node subordinate to the valley’s Late Classic rulers (Figure 7.3). Excavations here during 1996, however, indicated that all of the visible buildings, including the six monumental platforms, reached their final form during the Terminal Classic. This was the interval when centralized power was waning at La Sierra (you

Practicing Power Over Time  151

Figure 7.3  Map of Site 128.

can read about the investigations at Site 128 here: http://digital.kenyon.edu/ honduras/4991). These studies also indicated that Site 128 was anything but a homogeneous community. Instead, there is evidence that it was home to artisans engaged in a variety of crafts and contained at least two factions whose members contested for power. In brief, it appears that Site 128’s competing political leaders used the same resources—imported ceramics and obsidian blades—to attract and hold supporters. These goods were concentrated at specific buildings that we believe were associated with each faction. It was from these edifices that we hypothesize the goods were doled out to attract the labor and loyalty of the center’s residents. That neither side won out in these political contests implies that the resulting political structure was unstable and intergroup relations were tense. Aside from the fashioning of obsidian blades, craft production does not seem to have figured in elite efforts to gain power over others. Rather, specialized manufacture may have been instrumental in protecting the power of individual households to preserve some level of independence from their leaders. Tools used

152  Practicing Power Over Time

in, and debris generated by, fabricating ceramic figurines, pottery vessels, and cloth decoration are widespread, suggesting that perhaps all of the site’s residents pursued some crafts. It looks as though non-elites were successfully meeting most of their needs by their own efforts. Such relative self-sufficiency may have frustrated any efforts to create the sort of dependency relations on which stable political hierarchies could be created. Consequently, it looks as though Site 128’s political economy was marked by unresolved contests among two elite factions and the commoners they sought to lead, all of the participants using craft goods to assert and question power relations. Unlike in the Late Classic, craft manufacture may have served the political objectives of commoners as well as elites. Behavioral Variation among Sites Ongoing analyses suggest that residents of even neighboring Terminal Classic sites significantly diverged in the kinds of crafts they pursued. The case cited earlier of the complementary manufacturing activities recorded for Terminal Classic Sites 337 and 335 exemplifies this process. Additional excavations in 1995–1996 yielded other comparable situations. For example, Sites 175, 470, and 471 are located within 275 m of one another on the southern edge of the Naco Valley, about 3 km southwest of La Sierra (you can read about the investigations conducted at those sites here: http://digital.kenyon.edu/ hondurasreports). Each was home to a household, though the one utilizing 12 buildings at Site 175 was larger than those who raised the three small structures found at each of its immediate neighbors (Figures 7.4 and 7.5). All

Figure 7.4  M  ap of Site 175.

Practicing Power Over Time  153

Figure 7.5  P  lan of the excavations at Site 175. Structures 175-3, 4, 6, 7, and 9 were residences; Structures 175-2 and 10 were storerooms; Structure 175-1 was a raised work station with associated storage compartments.

were occupied primarily in the Terminal Classic and yielded evidence of significant variations in the activities performed within them, especially crafts. Site 470, for example, seems to have been a place where figurine molds and incense burners (ceramic vessels used to heat scent-generating resins during rituals) were stored. Fragments of both materials are far more common here than at Sites 471 and 175. On the other hand, it seems likely that the residents at Site 471 fired pottery vessels, probably including incense burners and figurines, as attested by a stone-lined oven found associated with tools used in fashioning ceramics (Figures 7.6 and 7.7). Apparently, tasks involved in making figurines and incense burners were divided among several close-by sites. Some tools and products were stored at Site 470, but with the firing done at Site 471. Meanwhile, grinding stones employed in processing such staples as

Figure 7.6  Plan of excavations at Site 471. Structure 471–3 on the settlement’s north edge is the oven used in firing ceramics.

Figure 7.7  Plan of Structure 471–3, the oven found at Site 471.

Practicing Power Over Time  155

corn into flour are heavily concentrated at Site 175, and are much less common at the other two neighboring settlements. That several of the grinding stones retrieved from Site 175 were unfinished points to the manufacture of this too here. We were surprised to find such variation in craft-related activities among nearby sites whose residents probably had access to the same raw materials. It may be that dividing manufacturing tasks among different households contributed to the formation of a social unit spread across several sites. Residents of these sites were united by their mutual dependence for needed goods. By cooperating in making incense burners and figurines, and exchanging both for grinding stones, people may have enacted social relations in very tangible ways. Such interdependence, in turn, could be part of yet another strategy through which non-elites thwarted efforts to make them dependent on elites at political centers for goods that they did not fashion themselves. This may represent a different way of preserving some level of autonomy that complements that inferred for Site 128. Variations in the Political Status of Artisans Available evidence also implies that artisans were variably successful in seeking power through their crafts. This view is suggested by inferred changes in the political position of at least some potters at La Sierra from the Late to Terminal Classic. During the former period, those working at the several kilns situated on the capital’s northern and southern margins lived in relatively humble accommodations close by firing facilities. The scales of the kilns themselves were modest, their designs apparently determined primarily by functional considerations. The one known kiln dating to the Terminal Classic differs considerably from its predecessors in its scale, nature of construction, and position within the built environment. This is the circular structure that we had so much trouble identifying during the 1990 field season (Figure 6.5). Its diameter of roughly 6 m makes it one of the largest kilns known anywhere in prehistoric southern Mesoamerica. Not only is the oven big, everything about the construction seems outsized. Its stone walls are 1.5–2 m thick, the air vents on the north and south are lined with cut blocks, and the surviving portion of the building is 0.6 m tall. When the domed bajareque (clay daub on wood) superstructure was added, the kiln probably stood about 2 m high, making it one of the tallest constructions at Terminal Classic La Sierra. This was an impressive manufacturing facility made all the more so by its setting on the edge of a 2 m-high natural rise. The kiln’s physical salience was reinforced by the construction of an extensive staircase, at least 8.4 m wide, that ascends this rise immediately northwest of the firing facility (Figure 7.8). The lower four steps are fashioned of cut blocks that were likely obtained from monumental buildings in the Late Classic site core. The use of shaped masonry here hints at the importance the

156  Practicing Power Over Time

Figure 7.8  P  hoto of the basal steps that comprise part of the staircase that ascends the natural rise immediately northwest of the Terminal Classic pottery kiln in northern La Sierra. Note the prevalence of cut blocks in the construction.

builders attributed to this entry feature. The residences lying just east of the kiln are also some of the larger domiciles found outside the Terminal Classic site core. Their occupants may well have commanded more labor than most Naco Valley householders, but less than that exercised by the high-ranking elites who survived the fall of the capital’s Late Classic rulers. In short, La Sierra’s Terminal Classic kiln seems to have been a monument to the importance of this group of potters within Terminal Classic Naco Valley society. There were good, practical reasons for situating a workshop that generates such noxious by-products as high heat, smoke, and sharp ceramic fragments away from most residences on the edge of the settlement. By carefully orchestrating the placement of the kiln and its architectural setting, however, potters could convert their marginal location into a position of preeminence. Their homes and kiln rising majestically above a stone staircase, La Sierra’s pottery workers seem to have moved beyond protecting their autonomy. They had apparently succeeded in converting craft production into a source of some preeminence.

Practicing Power Over Time  157

Wealth Variations among Households Far from being divided into clear socioeconomic classes, Terminal Classic Naco Valley households were arrayed along a continuum of varying degrees of wealth. Wealth is a relative measure of material wellbeing that can be hard to define in non-capitalist contexts where there are no obvious shared standards of value against which everyone’s standing can be explicitly evaluated. If being wealthy involves accumulating objects of high value, how is that crucial concept of “value” to be inferred from archaeological remains? In answering that question we pursued the ideas laid out in Chapter 6 that an item’s value is directly related to the time and effort required to make and/or acquire it. There are certainly other considerations that define value. Nevertheless, we felt that the time and effort expended in fashioning and obtaining an item stood a good chance of being universal components of value and had the advantage of being measurable archaeologically. The Naco Valley data class that exhibits the greatest variation in these factors is pottery. Sherds from locally made containers exhibit significant differences in degrees of decoration, from those lacking designs to others embellished with motifs that required as many as four steps to complete. Similarly, excavations throughout the valley had encountered varying numbers of ­ceramic fragments that came from imports. These exotic pots were frequently also adorned with complexly painted, incised, and/or engraved designs. The time spent in decorating such foreign vessels likely increased their value above that based on the effort required to secure them from distant realms. The scenes portrayed on many local and foreign containers almost certainly conveyed important social information that would have further enhanced local appreciation for these jars and bowls. Imported and locally made decorated pots were likely the prehistoric equivalents of the “good china” many of us have in our homes today. Brought out only on special occasions, the obvious high quality of these plates, bowls, and cups conveys our economic standing (we had the resources to acquire the set) and social refinement (we know how to use them in hosting honored guests). Simpler, less expensive plates are used when reheating leftovers for a quiet dinner at which only immediate family members are present. Based on these assumptions, we computed the proportion that sherds from high-value containers comprised of all Terminal Classic ceramics recovered from excavations in different patio groups. Variations in these figures pointed to the contrasting abilities of households to acquire valuables and to distinctions in wealth among them. A patio cluster at Site 391, where only 1.9 percent of the 1,775 analyzed sherds fell within the high-value class, was therefore home to a household that was “poorer” than the household of comparable size represented by Site 418, where 3.4 percent of the 1,959 studied fragments belonged to this category (the research conducted at these sites is reported here: http://digital.kenyon.edu/hondurasreports).

158  Practicing Power Over Time

Wealth, it turns out, correlates roughly with craft activities. The better-off households within and outside La Sierra tended to be those whose members engaged to the greatest degree in the widest range of specialized production. One factor contributing to the material wellbeing of a domestic group was, seemingly, participation in crafts generating surpluses that could be exchanged for valuables among, most likely, other goods. This relationship was hardly perfect. In some settlements, residents producing considerable surpluses were not richly rewarded for their efforts. The figurine manufacturers of Site 337, for example, did not enjoy wealth measures appreciably higher than the people living at Site 391 who did not engage to any great extent in a craft. Still, it looked as though people might choose to take part in specialized manufacturing to enhance their ability to accumulate valuables. Such decisions, however, were made within structural constraints that included considerations of: • • • •

what raw materials a household had access to; the manufacturing skills they possessed; the number of people who could be recruited to fashion goods; and what other producers were making in different parts of the basin.

Successful households mobilized labor, knowledge, and resources to meet their own requirements and to exchange for esteemed items, including highvalue ceramics. The more desirable vessels ultimately, if not directly, might have come from the elites who imported them. Less advantaged social units could meet fewer of their material needs through their own work. Thus, they had to “spend” a proportionately greater amount of their total assets to get what they required, less being left over with which to acquire valuables. Assets, therefore, flowed toward those who could produce the greatest amount and widest range of goods, and away from those who could make the least. The result was a Terminal Classic political economy that was not characterized by a rigid division between wealthy elites and impoverished commoners. Rather, there was a continuum of wealth that was shaped by choices made within structural constraints to engage in certain manufacturing streams. These findings converge with those made by John Douglass whose work was briefly summarized in Chapter 4. The Naco Valley in a Regional Context What we have reconstructed for the Naco Valley parallels developments seen in other parts of Southeast Mesoamerica from the eighth through tenth centuries. Around AD 800, for example, the Copán dynasty had fallen and the land its kings had ruled was divided among the lesser nobility. Similar patterns of political decentralization are also coming to light in areas bordering the Naco and Copán valleys. This suggests that the political perturbations

Practicing Power Over Time  159

experienced in the former area were part of a more general phenomenon. Remember that two of the three possible foundations of paramount power in the Late Classic Naco Valley—elite control over the local distribution of decorated pottery vessels and obsidian cores—depended on imports. Any events that undermined the ability of exchange partners to provide elaborately decorated ceramics and obsidian nuclei threatened the very foundations of the Naco Valley hierarchy. It may not be the case that the quantities of valuables passing among Southeast Mesoamerican polities dropped initially during the Terminal Classic. The fall of powerful dynasties, however, likely made it difficult to restrict these transactions to small groups of elites who could monopolize the local disbursement of esteemed items to their clients. Imported valuables may now have been accessible to a wider range of people who could employ them in their own bids for supporters and power. Thus, political decentralization and the dispersion of crafts across the Naco Valley were related to developments occurring throughout large parts of southern Mesoamerica. Shifting Relations among Power, Production, and People Newly acquired data were challenging our inferences to the best explanation about Naco Valley prehistory. Before 1992, we saw a single, basin-wide hierarchy that endured for three centuries and was based, in part, on centralized control over craft production. Now we recognized that this picture was faulty, the result of combining evidence from different points in a long span of political and economic development into one unchanging phase. Equipped with the ability to distinguish at least some moments in that sequence from each other, we were forced to recognize just how dynamic life in the Naco Valley had been from the seventh through tenth centuries. We also became increasingly aware of how events in surrounding areas were implicated in the basin’s history. These discoveries raised new questions, in particular, how were political and economic relations reconstituted during the Terminal Classic? It was shifts in these variables that posed the greatest challenges to our guiding PGT. We had not expected to see power and crafts flowing out from La Sierra during the ninth and tenth centuries, creating a mosaic of political centers variably related to a complex arrangement of manufacturing locales. Prestige goods theory, as we were employing it, encouraged us to see craft production as a firm basis of centralized power. That connection may have applied in the Late Classic. It did not describe the Terminal Classic political economy. We are trying now to understand how specialized manufacture might have figured in the strategies of those seeking preeminence during a period of political decentralization. We turned to practice theory (PT) to understand the complex relations among power, crafts, and changes in both over time that characterized the Terminal Classic in the Naco Valley.

160  Practicing Power Over Time

Practice Theory Inspiration for our reimagining of power and economic relations was provided by practice theory. This body of thought, associated with social scientists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Sherry Ortner, and Sir Anthony Giddens (Giddens only to some extent—he was more inspirational to us for his work on structuration than ideas about practice; see Boxes 7.3 to 7.5), was not new in 1995–1996. Discussions of the approach began to appear in print with some frequency in the late 1970s, and some anthropologists were embracing PT by the middle 1980s. Content with PGT, we had not paid these developments much heed. Things were different after 1996. Practice theory loosely unites researchers who are committed to finding a middle path between explanations founded on structural principles and those that rely heavily on the enlightened actions of motivated individuals.

Box 7.3 Pierre Bourdieu Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist and anthropologist, was one of the most influential social scientists of the late twentieth century. He challenged traditional approaches to the study of human behavior that stressed the power of economic, social, political, and ideological structures to determine human actions. Instead, in his Theory of Practice (English translation, 1977) and later works, Bourdieu argues that there is a reflexive relationship between structure and action such that structural principles (for example, hierarchy and class) only take shape and influence human behavior when they are internalized and put into practice by individuals. Central to his formulation is the notion of habitus, the set of durable, largely unconscious dispositions to action that we learn as children and which guide our behaviors throughout life. These habitus (the same form in the singular and plural) are strategies by which agents deploy the tangible and conceptual resources (also called “capital” by Bourdieu) available to them in pursuit of the power to achieve their own goals and to exercise dominion over others. Access to these assets within a society is unequally distributed depending on a person’s social position. Any society, therefore, constitutes a field which accommodates multiple habitus yielding variable behaviors and degrees of success in political struggles. Bourdieu’s formulations have been challenged but his central insight that structures of inequality are regularly performed in a wide array of contexts by diverse sets of people employing varied resources has helped open new vistas into the causes of human behavior. It has also clarified how inequality can persist despite its deleterious consequences for the majority.

Practicing Power Over Time  161 Box 7.4 Sherry Ortner Sherry Ortner is an anthropologist who has done extensive research among the Sherpas of Nepal and, more recently, on class relations in the United States. She played a large role in introducing the precepts of practice theory, as championed by social scientists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Sir Anthony Giddens, into U.S. anthropology. Her 1984 article, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” in particular, has done much to make the principles of practice theory part of mainstream theoretical debates among U.S. anthropologists. Much of Ortner’s work within practice theory has focused on questions of how people resist overarching social rules and try to transform those rules in the course of daily interactions. As with Bourdieu and Giddens, social structures for Ortner do not exist apart from, nor do they totally dominate, the individuals who operate within them. Instead, these frameworks set boundaries to action within which people maneuver with varying success to define and obtain their objectives. In the process of these maneuverings social structures may change, though not always in the directions that those initiating the transformation might have intended.

Box 7.5 Sir Anthony Giddens British sociologist Sir Anthony Giddens is engaged in a life-long effort to: reform sociology by critically examining classic works in the field; promote an approach, which he calls structuration theory, to the study of modern social life; and, most recently, to assess how broad processes such as globalization affect the lives of individuals. His work on structuration theory, as described in The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (1984), has had a profound influence on anthropological and archaeological thought. A form of practice theory, Giddens’s formulation hinges on what he calls “the duality of structure.” This phrase conveys the important notion that structure and agency are not opposed to each other, as they have traditionally been described in social theory. Instead, they exist in a recursive relationship. The former consists of a set of conceptual and physical resources along with the rules by which they are allocated to people occupying different positions within that structure. Those positions might be defined by the

162  Practicing Power Over Time intersection of such variables as age, gender, and socioeconomic class. Structure pre-exists those born into it and both constrains and enables the exercise of individual agency. Nonetheless, structure only comes to life when agents use the available rules and resources to define and achieve their objectives. Hence, structure does not exist above and apart from the behaviors of agents. Most actions reinforce and reproduce the structure in which they are carried out. Still, because structure exists in and through the behaviors of agents, the latter can change structure if they modify the distribution of its resources and the nature of its rules by taking novel actions. Understanding social change and continuity, therefore, requires grasping the crucial nexus among resources, rules, and the ways people employ both in their daily lives.

Structural theories see human behavior as an outcome of forces that are largely beyond individual control. We do what we do because we are constrained to act in certain ways by social, political, ideological, and/or physical environmental forces that define our lives. Culture history, processualism, and some forms of Marxism qualify as structural theories. In these schools, cultural norms, processes of adaptation, and the mode of production comprise the determining structures. Theories that give pride of place to agency—the potential people have to make choices—take the opposite position. Here it is the goal-driven actions of rational agents that determine cultural forms and patterns of change. As we noted in Chapter 5, some versions of Marxism allow for at least the limited exercise of agency within the constraints offered by the mode of production and the dominant ideology. The structure/agency distinction defines two poles on a continuum of thought. Few theorists propose that people are unreflective automatons incapable of understanding their place in the world or what causes them to act in certain ways. Similarly, views of culture dominated by the exercise of unbridled free will in the pursuit of individual aims represent an extreme position to which few would subscribe. Nevertheless, social science theories tend to gravitate toward one or the other of the structure/agency poles. Practice theorists are distinguished by their insistence on exploring how structure and agency are combined in the genesis and reproduction of patterned human behavior. The notion that structure does not exist apart from agency is essential to most investigations conducted along these lines. The two are inseparable. Structural principles underlying, say, political relations, only have social significance when enacted by people in the course of their daily lives. Agency, in turn, cannot be initiated without resources, in the form of ideas, social relations, and actual goods, provided by structure. Structures that are never performed in regularly recurring events have no social reality. Written works that imagine utopian communities may outline structures of interpersonal

Practicing Power Over Time  163

interaction. If these plans never inspire action, however, their social significance is negligible. Many practice theorists are concerned with actions taken in the political sphere. Here attention often centers on how inequality is created within modern nation states. According to practice theorists, such odious distinctions are not solely the outcome of government bureaucracies enforcing explicit policies. These policies are part of the framework that defines the limits of individual advancement. They do not, however, dictate how people will understand those limits and work within them to accomplish their own objectives. What are of particular interest to practice theorists are the ways in which political structures are insinuated within, and thus come alive through, the habitual behaviors of goal-seeking individuals, those behaviors constituting what Bourdieu calls habitus. The link between structure and action is often mediated through the concept of a strategy. In essence, people are variably aware of the conditions, including power relations, within which they live. However conscious they are of these circumstances, they have to make do within them. They must get on with life in ways that offer at least some physical and conceptual rewards. To do so, they formulate strategies that are adjusted to the social, political, economic, and environmental circumstances into which they are born. Drawing on the physical and conceptual resources available to them by virtue of their position within a structure, they define goals that are attainable and develop the means to reach them. Successful strategies survive and are adopted by many of those living within the same general structural circumstances. In this way, patterns of behavior develop and are transmitted across generations. Since any one society is composed of people who occupy different structural positions—defined by the intersection of such variables as, say, class, gender, and ethnicity—it is likely to encompass a variety of strategies. Practice theorists, therefore, subscribe to the postmodernist position that societies are fragmented along different, variably intersecting lines of interest and experience. There are several important points to keep in mind about these strategies. First, there is rarely only one way to cope with a given structure from a certain position within it. Structures define the parameters of action, but they do not dictate the forms those actions will take. This leads to the second point, structures are both constraining and enabling. The ways in which resources are distributed within these frameworks preclude some possible strategies, while making others both imaginable and doable. If people are born into a low-ranking social group whose members are denied education beyond the sixth grade, then they cannot reasonably develop a strategy aimed at becoming a lawyer or doctor. If jobs such as blacksmithing, sheep shearing, and cattle herding are deemed appropriate for members in this social position, and they are provided with the resources to pursue those careers, then low-status individuals can choose from among such options in developing a strategy to support themselves. In this way, people exercise their creativity within limits as they make a life for themselves within a specific structure.

164  Practicing Power Over Time

Third, once established, strategies tend to be practiced habitually—that is, they are rarely subject to conscious, critical evaluation. Strategies are part of life and of the worldviews that make that life intelligible (recall our discussion of worldviews in Chapter 1). Such generally unreflective acceptance of these ways of making do leads to the fourth point: these procedures powerfully enact and perpetuate structural principles, however indirectly. If, as a person of low economic and social status, you decide to be a blacksmith, you are reinforcing a structure that subordinates you and your peers by denying all of you education and other resources, thus limiting your life chances. On some level you may know this. But if the blacksmithing strategy works, if it gets you through life with a certain amount of personal security and satisfaction, then you will pursue it. Should you challenge the system and insist on getting the schooling you need to be a lawyer, you will be instituting a new strategy, or appropriating one used by others but previously denied you. This has system-­changing possibilities. And that is the last point we wish to highlight: social change occurs through the intended and unintended consequences of shifts made in the strategies people employ to cope with specific structures. This follows from the observation that it is through patterned actions in the form of strategies that structure exists as a social force. A change in strategies means a change in the structure on which they are based. The trick is to shift resource flows that will enable the appearance and general acceptance of new strategies. Just wanting to be a lawyer is not enough. You have to know what a lawyer is, how to become one, have the assets to support this quest, and then convince others that they should let you try. Achieving these goals is never easy, as the history of efforts made by women and minorities in the United States to become doctors and lawyers bears out. Changing strategies and resource flows, however, are the means by which structures are transformed. Practice theorists thus look for the causes of human behavior in the strategies that give rise to those mundane, repetitive, largely unconscious actions that give life to overarching structures. The forms those strategies take are conditioned, not determined, by the resources to which people occupying different social positions have access. Structure (the source of resources) and agency (the choices made to use those assets in support of action) are thus closely wedded. Behavior is, in this view, shaped through the conditional agency of goal-directed individuals who draw on structure to exercise agency. It is at the intersection of structure and agency that human action is born. Our Version of Practice Theory What we took from this approach is a formulation inspired by the writings of numerous scholars but not precisely based on the work of any one of them. In adapting PT to our emerging appreciation of data patterns in the Terminal Classic Naco Valley we arrived at the following conceptual framework. People seek to accomplish a variety of goals in life. Among those objectives is the ability to live their lives as they choose and to get others to help them in

Practicing Power Over Time  165

that process. People, in short, seek power to define and meet their own needs and power over others whose labor and support can be harnessed to achieve those aims. Since individuals are all seeking the power to protect their own labor while siphoning off the productive efforts of their neighbors, political contests are an important part of many, but not all, human interactions. This is the aspect of life on which our theory concentrates. To be successful in political competitions, it is necessary to acquire regular and predictable control over assets essential to exercising power in all its senses. These resources range from tangible features of the physical ­environment—say, arable land and the food harvested from it—to such intangible elements as conceptions of supernatural beings and the knowledge needed to conduct rituals to appease them. Assets composed of ideas and things are equally important to achieving power in both senses used here. Insofar as people can sustain themselves physically and define their place within the world of human and supernatural forces, they are in an excellent position to lead their own lives as they choose. To the extent that a few can monopolize some of these resources, they can exert power over all those who must turn to that small group for the means to feed themselves and establish their position within the world. The wider the array of resources controlled by a privileged minority, the greater their ability to dictate what others must surrender in labor and loyalty in return for access to these goods and ideas. The fewer such assets under central control, the weaker the position of would-be elites will be. People rarely engage in power contests, or any activity for that matter, alone. Instead, the successful acquisition, distribution, and use of resources depends on cooperation with others, organized in social networks, in pursuit of similar political projects. Cooperation in these webs is often founded on their members sharing a social identity, or persona, a culturally constructed sense of self in relation to others. These affiliations are often marked by distinctive symbols to which members have access. Networks in this sense are, in part, socially constructed means for coordinating the actions of groups of people who deploy resources in support of common projects designed to exert power over others and in their own lives. Individuals can, and often do, belong to multiple social networks, each with its own identity and geared to accomplishing certain goals using the distinct set of resources controlled by members of that web. Any one society, like that which existed in the Terminal Classic Naco Valley, consists of a dense network made up of smaller networks among which people move with variable ease. Some of these webs extend beyond a society’s boundaries, linking members in different realms who cooperate in the pursuit of common political projects (for example, those involving the exchange of obsidian cores and decorated pottery). Others are highly localized, such as nets that tie together members of a single household. Still other nets unite all members of a specific polity. This is just a skeletal outline of the complex web of interconnections in which people living in the Naco Valley during the Late

166  Practicing Power Over Time

and Terminal Classic may have participated. Archaeologists can only identify those networks that were distinguished by imperishable and prominent material symbols. We can console ourselves with the thought that, whereas we may never be able to describe all the social connections people might have activated, we should be able to identify the most significant of such linkages. These are the ones that probably played the largest roles in structuring interpersonal interactions and determining the results of political contests. Political webs are created and reproduced within structural constraints. These latter features—combining physical characteristics of the environment with social, political, and economic relations and variably shared ­worldviews—define how material and conceptual resources are distributed among all participants taking part in social networks. As a result, these structural constraints affect what political projects are possible. They do not, however, determine how those potentials are translated into action. Rather, what shapes power structures is the manner in which individuals, as members of social nets, take advantage of the opportunities offered by existing arrangements of structural features to secure assets by allying with some in opposition to others. Agency, in this formulation, is not exercised solely by willful individuals. It is a feature of groups who operate with variable degrees of freedom and success to claim the tangible and intangible resources offered within particular structures. An element of creativity is inherent in this process. People’s actions are not dictated by the resource framework into which they are born. On the other hand, there is never an infinite array of possible ways that assets can be harnessed through networks in seeking political goals, but there is usually more than one. How nets and resources are combined determines the manner in which political structures will either remain the same, or change. We are now in the process of applying the theory sketched above to Terminal Classic data that have been gathered over all field seasons. Specifically, we are looking at craft production as part of the strategies that people adopted to deal with a political structure that was in the process of undergoing dramatic transformations. We want to answer such questions as: 1) How were different forms of craft manufacture used to fashion resources used by networks of people who were seeking some form of power at varying spatial and temporal scales? 2) In what ways did the production, exchange, and use of items instantiate these social webs? 3) How can we evaluate the success of such efforts in the form of control over labor or the ability of artisans to accumulate valued items? In the course of these studies, we have to acknowledge that different crafts had varying political significance in different periods. Thus, artisans may have manufactured pottery in their role as clients of Late Classic elites at La Sierra. By the Terminal Classic, however, at least some potters seemingly

Practicing Power Over Time  167

used their craft as the basis for claims to increasing preeminence after their patrons’ fall. That is, the production and distribution of ceramic vessels were among the actions by which social webs of different sorts came alive in the dealings of craftworkers and those who consumed their output. Similarly, at Site 128, the strategic distribution of obsidian blades made at the center may have been one way that several factions of elites competed to create hierarchically structured networks that they dominated. At the same time, commoners at Site 128 seemingly tried to lessen their reliance on these would-be rulers by fashioning their own social webs, made tangible through the creation, use, and exchange of other goods. Crafts may also have been used to unite social networks composed of commoners residing at multiple sites. This seems to have been the case at Sites 175, 470, and 471, where mutual dependence was possibly enacted in daily practices of manufacture, storage, and exchange that transcended settlement boundaries. Distinctions in household wealth may be one symptom of the varying degrees of success enjoyed by members of these and other networks as they sought valued goods. Such success, in turn, apparently depended partly on the ability of people working within different webs to mobilize the skills and raw materials needed to engage in various crafts. The resulting Terminal Classic political economy is thus one in which power and wealth did not neatly co-vary within a single valley-wide hierarchy. Instead, the variably coordinated, possibly harmonious actions of numerous protagonists organized in overlapping networks yielded a dynamic, heterarchical structure in which people of diverse ranks actively participated. This framework was a joint project whose form was constantly shifting as decisions made in one quarter altered the distribution of resources that everyone else needed to define and accomplish their goals. The Terminal Classic Naco Valley political economy was, paraphrasing Sir Anthony Giddens, the product of intentional action but not an intended product. We are no longer using PGT to explain events what occurred in the Naco Valley from the seventh through tenth centuries. This theory may still yield insights into political relations during the first two centuries of that span. It has given way to PT in understanding what happened in the succeeding Terminal Classic. The shift was made not because the latter approach is better than its predecessor in any absolute sense. Practice theory just helps us to make sense of the detailed data now available for the Terminal Classic in ways that PGT did not. Using PT, we can see relations we had never perceived before, and we are less mystified by what had heretofore been baffling. Our inferences to the best explanation have again changed. This transformation is driven by the recovery of new data, the availability of hypotheses based on theories with which to account for those finds, and our newfound appreciation for how the latter can be successfully applied to the former. We will not be testing hypotheses derived from PT against new data unearthed from the Naco Valley. Instead, we will offer interpretations of existing material patterns based on our PT-inspired framework for others to evaluate. Hopefully, some will find them useful and apply their own version

168  Practicing Power Over Time

of our interpretive structure in their work, just as other people’s investigations in other places spurred our research. The refinements made in the course of such applications will inevitably yield the fresh insights out of which knowledge emerges, honed in the application of theory to data. Summary We are coming to realize that the broad processes of political change on which we had focused through 1991 arose from a complex array of mini-­processes operating between and within Terminal Classic sites. Macro-­processes, such as political decentralization, describe the outcomes of decisions made by a host of people of all ranks as they sought to adapt to the changing circumstances precipitated by the collapse of dynastic rule at La Sierra around AD 800. The Terminal Classic Naco Valley political economy, therefore, was not the product of a centrally conceived design imposed by elites. Rather, it was an unstable outcome of numerous daily interactions, in the course of which valley residents of all backgrounds defined their goals and developed strategies to achieve them. It was in these contexts that people decided what, if any, crafts they wished to take up, the scale and intensity at which they would pursue them, and with whom they would ally within and across settlements. Committing to any craft depended on a person’s assessment of what her/his compatriots living throughout the basin were doing, including what manufacturing tasks they were pursuing. It also was based on evaluations of what political and economic rewards were likely to result from fashioning vessels, molding figurines, or working obsidian. Crafts, in short, were among the ways in which people navigated a dynamic political landscape. Pursuing certain manufacturing tasks offered opportunities for advancement for those who could successfully calculate the risks and advantages of using different strategies. It was out of this give-and-take that the heterarchical structure of multiple political centers and factional contests for power (seen at places such as Site 128) emerged. Prestige goods theory directed us to search for the genesis of power differentials in elite-­inspired domination schemes. Now we are looking at how political formations might have risen instead from the bottom up. The process of interpreting and reinterpreting your data never ends.

The Naco Valley, AD 825—As Seen from 2018 By AD 825, the newly ensconced elites at La Sierra must have worn their preeminence uneasily. They were precariously balanced atop a political structure whose form was continually up for negotiation. The usurpers had literally driven their predecessors from memory, abandoning and vandalizing the buildings in which the latter had lived and worshiped. Nevertheless, there was some charisma still attached to those old monarchs. Raising the new site core adjoining its Late Classic antecedent allowed the successors

Practicing Power Over Time  169

to draw on that aura. They would need all the help they could get. Challengers had set themselves up in political capitals of their own within the basin and were avidly competing for imports that were essential to securing and exhibiting power differences. La Sierra’s new lords might have been slightly ahead in these contests, but not by much. Every new leader was forging the networks that tied him or her to foreign suppliers of obsidian cores and decorated pottery. They then used these valuables to create webs of dependents who owed them labor and loyalty in return for precious gifts. It behooved every aspirant to power to be generous with their clients as there were several potential benefactors to choose from. Power was a fragile commodity. La Sierra’s notables might hold their heads high. Still, they and all their counterparts had to keep their feet firmly planted on the ground, aware of what each subordinate wanted and what they were being offered by competitors. As elites probably saw the situation, a big part of the problem was the annoying capacity of their underlings to shield themselves from demands issuing from on high. The collapse of the Late Classic dynasty opened up new opportunities for households to assert control over their own destinies. The skills needed to pursue crafts that had formerly been limited primarily to La Sierra were now available to many. Commoners were not slow to seize this opportunity. Taking advantage of raw materials easily secured from their immediate surroundings, these new artisans started fashioning goods for their own use and exchange. In some cases, several households banded together to make a wide array of items, sharing responsibility for the work and any goods obtained through exchange. The result was an increasingly complex economy linking households in overlapping networks of mutual dependence. This system largely operated outside elite control and could be used to sustain commoners physically as well as spiritually. The paraphernalia, such as figurines, whistles, ocarinas, and incense burners, needed to approach supernatural forces were obtained through inter-household transactions, as were such prosaic items as ground stone tools essential to processing food. Making this strategy work required that all participants devote time and energy to building their own social webs instantiated, in part, through making and exchanging craft products. The resulting system was far from stable. Elites sought supporters among commoners who were simultaneously courting allies in exchange relations on which everyone was coming to depend. A wide range of imports and local goods moved through the valley among equals and between elites and clients. Slight perturbations in the availability of crucial goods within such a complex, decentralized network of networks could spell its doom. Those enmeshed in the system were probably too busy acquiring, making, and distributing goods, as well as negotiating social relations, to note its fragility. It would catch up with them eventually. In AD 825, however, the future may well have looked bright, especially for those commoners who were emerging from the shadow of La Sierra’s Late Classic dynasty.

170  Practicing Power Over Time

The Naco Valley of AD 825, as seen from 2018, bears little resemblance to how the valley looked to us in 1979. The peaceful earlier vision is superseded by the hustle and bustle of people trying to create their own futures through their own efforts. Is this version true? That is a very difficult question to answer. What we can say with confidence is that the above reconstruction is almost certainly closer to the messy, shifting reality that all residents of the Naco Valley faced in AD 825 than the earlier scenarios we have outlined here. That is progress we can believe in.

8 Identity

If Marxian approaches can be characterized as a big tent, something larger is needed for postprocessualism, perhaps a massive stadium like the Azteca in Mexico City, or Ohio State’s the Shoe. The term accommodates a wide range of perspectives that do not, together, form a coherent body of thought. This is not a criticism of postprocessualism as its practitioners shy away from ­creating a single over-arching approach to description and explanation. To call the variety of approaches discussed here “post-processual” also ­suggests that they are all recent developments. On the contrary, they developed alongside processualism, although these ways of looking at the past did not come into prominence as early as processualism did. Because these sets of ideas have been commonly pursued in more recent times, then, they are “­post-­processualism” only in that sense. The broad schools of thought covered here are concerned with identity, investigations of meaning, the importance of personal experience, and the growing recognition that even though archaeology focuses, by necessity on things and places, we archaeologists have, perhaps, not given enough, or the right kind of, attention to things. The approaches described below do not fit under the rubric of “­modernism,” a broad construct that shaped much thought during twentieth century. Since we ­d iscussed modernism in the processualism chapter, we will not ­repeat what we said there. Several other concepts are, however, significant for what ­follows: postmodernism, humanism, and posthumanism. Postmodernism, of course, comes in a sense after modernism, and as a reaction to it. As with many schools of thought, modernism still exists and shapes much current thought, and postmodernism runs concurrently with its predecessor, becoming important in the last third of the previous century. Originating in the humanities, especially literary criticism, postmodernism questions the existence of single, authoritative readings of texts. Members of the school challenge the idea that it is possible to decide exactly what a writer was trying to convey in his or her work, going so far as to argue that the real meaning of a text is created through the dynamic interplay between the reader and the written word. At postmodernism’s base is the notion that language, in its vocabulary and grammar, does not convey meaning precisely

172 Identity

and unambiguously. Rather, texts, despite the best efforts of authors, are ­a lways capable of multiple interpretations; their meanings are indeterminate. As there is no definitive account of a book’s meaning, readers have no choice but to make their own, equally valid interpretations of what is being said, based on their unique perspectives born of their distinct personal histories. Meaning, therefore, is always relative and never absolute; it depends on who is doing the reading and the context in which that reading occurs. As a result, generalizations about a text’s significance offered by such “authorities” as literary critics or the authors themselves are untenable. Translating postmodernist insights to the social sciences requires seeing ­human behavior in the past and present as a text that researchers attempt to read. Processualists, for example, read the text composed of patterned ­relations among things and the actions that created those patterns using ­adaptation as the key. The meaning of those objects and behaviors relates to how they promoted the survival of a culture. Postmodernists question such ­authoritative readings as too simplistic. Processualists, it is argued, fail to take into account what postmodernists see as the essential truth that ­meaning cannot be ­imposed on “texts” from outside, that meanings are relative to the individuals who create and interact with those texts. The question of whether or not the archaeological record is a text of sorts, or could be read as one, will be discussed later in the section on meaning and how the discipline of ­semiotics has shaped this aspect of interpretation. More important for the moment are ideas that directly relate to social science theory. Rather than seeking to create a coherent body of theory, p­ ostmodernists are intent on critiquing existing intellectual frameworks, especially ­generalizing approaches derived from modernism. This aim is itself conditioned by ­postmodernist views that theory, like all aspects of life, is inextricably bound up with power relations. In this sense, postmodernists carry forward the Marxist notion that theory is rarely value-free and may consciously or unconsciously promote exploitation. Unlike Marxists, however, postmodernists contend that no theory exposes the unvarnished realities of culture and nature. Since all theory is political, the best a scholar can do is to reveal, or deconstruct, the subtle ways in which conceptual schemes of every stripe contribute to rationalizing and obscuring the structures of inequality that pervade modern life. Once these implicit political meanings are revealed, people can see clearly the ideological web of oppression in which they are trapped, and then act to free themselves from it. Postmodernists have other reasons for rejecting modernist, scientific approaches to the study of human behavior. According to many postmodernists, theories that encourage generalizing perspectives on human action and thought diminish appreciation for cultural diversity and human agency. Scientific perspectives, such as Marxism and processualism, see people as subject to forces (political or adaptive) beyond their control, even as they submerge differences among cultures in a search for similarities of process and development. Seeking to diminish diversity and agency might be justified if the

Identity  173

broad principles that processualists and Marxists seek can be identified. To many postmodernists, this is impossible. On the one hand, according to postmodernists, the operation of such overarching forces as adaptation and power struggles cannot be specified in the absence of a theory that gives them pride of place. The validity of that theory cannot be established in the absence of supporting data. Yet, any findings marshaled in support of a theory are already predetermined by that conceptual scheme and do not constitute an independent test of its validity. We reviewed this notion in Chapter 1 when we discussed the relationship between theory and data. At that time, we took a “weak” view of the connection, saying that our conceptual frameworks condition us to make some observations but not others. Nevertheless, the power of theory over our imagination and vision is not so great as to prevent recognizing information that contradicts the basic principles of our guiding theory. Some postmodernists take a much “stronger” stance concerning this relationship, arguing that theory colors data so thoroughly that the data are created in the image of the theory. If such is the case, then the search for general principles is hopeless. We can never be sure if what we are seeing is just a reflection of what our theory conditions us to recognize. In addition, postmodernists contend that the complex interconnections among human behaviors render invisible to us the operation of any broad principles of human action that might exist. This notion is called intertextuality. In essence, intertextuality means that there are multiple links among various aspects of human actions and beliefs. The connections operate simultaneously on several spatial scales over varying lengths of time. As a result, in essence, everything determines, and is determined by, everything else. Identifying causation within this maze is impossible; the best one can hope to do is to describe the phenomenon under study as expressively and completely as possible. The appearance of domestication may indeed be conditioned by demographic shifts and political calculations. But these are only two threads within a much more complicated web of political, economic, social, and ideological factors that together created, and were reflexively created by, domestication. Specifying which of those threads was more significant in promoting cultivation and herding is, to postmodernists, ­impossible without some guiding theory. As we have already seen, however, all theory is suspect because of the way it skews observation and conveys political biases. At the heart of postmodernists’ profound dislike of generalizing scientific throty is their view that modernist theories are politically dangerous: they contribute to the creation of totalizing narratives of the sorts used to undergird authoritarian states. In this view, Nazis and totalitarian Communists, for example, are united in that their regimes were based on generalizing accounts of human history and behavior. These visions differed from each other but were all founded on supposedly scientific premises that provided blueprints for regimented, highly centralized, bureaucratic regimes. In these

174 Identity

systems, the freedom to dissent was but one of many casualties. Unlike modernists, postmodernists see science not as a means of liberation, but of ­exploitation. By denying the utility of science in all fields, but especially in the social sciences, postmodernists aim to undermine the rationales of would-be despots. The postmodernist world, therefore, is a complex, unpredictable place in which reality does not exist independently of those who experience it. Unwilling to make sweeping generalizations, postmodernists do not focus on what is for them the impossible search for truth. Instead, they seek to describe specific situations as these play out over particular moments in time and are experienced by certain people with distinct backgrounds. In this view, sweeping narratives of human history and behavior are challenged by the complexity of individual cases; and each case is shaped by countless historical forces that are uniquely combined in different circumstances.

Humanism Humanism has a long and distinguished pedigree, spanning all hemispheres of the globe. There are, for example, Chinese and Indian versions of ­humanism, but here we are concerned with the sort of humanism that is found in Western cultures. In particular, we focus on the strands that are current in the United States and the United Kingdom; and even here, the term “humanism” is used in different fields to indicate similar, but not identical, ideas. In general, humanism focuses on individual human beings and their characteristics. Humanism postulates that peoples have agency both as individuals and in groups. People also have individual liberty and can decide for themselves what ethical and moral standards are appropriate in their lives. This flows from the idea that the self is both rational and autonomous. The individuality and personal decision-making intrinsic to humanism also mean that there are few, if indeed there are any, absolute truths. In this sense, humanism and Romanticism have much in common. “Truth” is a relative concept, and specific cultures have their own ideas about what constitutes truth. This is of course, cultural relativity, similar to the concept in anthropology. As in anthropology, humanistic relativism does not prevent people and groups from making moral and ethical judgements about others as individuals and groups, but it does mean that we should approach places, situations, people, and cultures without initial presuppositions. That is, we should seek to understand others before passing judgement. Also parts of humanism are the importance of rationality and empiricism. Rationality means that we are all capable of critical thinking, hence we all have the ability to come to decisions about ethics and morals, based on our own experience of the world. Empiricism signifies that judgements are based on a consideration of evidence. If this sounds like privileging a version of scientific inquiry as important in directing life, rather than relying on accepted beliefs, you are correct. People should be free to make their own decisions

Identity  175

under moral and ethical codes that they develop. Humans do, however, share an inherent human nature, according to the humanist perspective, and so should be able to come up with similar codes no matter the culture in which they were brought up. In short, Humanism puts human beings at the center of all thought and analysis. People are separate from nature, yet embedded in the natural world. A humanist position entails care of that natural world, but still, the perspective arises from the place of people at the center. Another term for this is anthropocentrism. We may encounter humanism in situations where we might not be aware of it. Humanist thought shapes, for example, one approach in psychology: our individuality shapes our perceptions of “reality” and modes of treatment should highlight the innate goodness of people and the empathy we have for one another. In humanist-influenced education, learning should result in the fulfilment of one’s potential. In both fields, the freedom of each of us, and the existence in us of a will to change, are central. Critiques of humanism abound, and we will encounter some of them as we proceed through the various approaches to archaeology that follow.

Posthumanism, Transhumanism, and Antihumanism Although these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, they do differ. Let’s start with the last one—antihumanism—because the two parts of the word sum up the position. Antihumanism is opposed to the basic premises of humanism. People are not at the center of everything, there is no “­human nature,” and we are constrained in numerous ways, thus “freedom” is an illusion. Transhumanism relates to humans and technology. Peoples are already incorporating technology into their bodies—Pat, for example, has two artificial knees—and in the future humans are likely to incorporate a wide variety of other technologies, such as bio-mechanical aids and computation devices. We will all be cyborgs, combinations of biological humans and ­human-crafted technology. It is clear that this aspect of after-­humanism looks to the future, and its relevance to archaeology is not immediately apparent. The more general term “posthumanism” suggests that humanism is passé—we have gotten beyond it to something else. For example, posthumanist thought sees no division between people and animals, but rather a continuum. This stands in opposition to often-accepted Western binaries: people–animals; culture–nature. Moreover, people have no fixed “nature,” nor do animals: living beings are modified by place and circumstance, and can also be self-modifying. More recently, posthumanist thought has turned to the possibilities of continua between plants, animals, and humans. An additional aspect has to do with identity: peoples do not have “an identity,” but rather a variety of identities that are contingent on temporal, physical, and social circumstances. The stance, then does not postulate a fixed “human nature”; individuals are in constant flux.

176 Identity

How these concepts relate to contemporary archaeology will be addressed in the following material. Now we turn to the relationship of postprocessualism and interpretivism and the processual approach.

Processualism and Postprocessualism One of the main objections to processualism as time went on was that it was too embedded in modernism, what postprocessualists saw as a problematic influence on contemporary life. In distinction to processualists, postprocessualists did not regard archaeology as a science. Testing hypotheses was not problematic, but hypotheses were not arrived at by deduction; induction was a more likely method of arriving at ideas to examine. Because archaeology was not a science, we archaeologists were wasting our time searching for laws of any sort, let alone universal laws. In addition, processualism looked at groups, not individuals. While something like agency could be ascribed to groups—the term agency was not actually used—processualists acted as though individuals and their choices were not consequential. The sort of agency recognized in processualism was limited to responses to some change in the larger system, often thought to be alterations in the environment. Consideration was not given to other aspects that might influence change: the contingency of situations; how culture was instantiated materially by behavior based on choice, albeit constrained choice; and the reality that people socially constructed not just their relationships with other humans, but all their relationships, technologies, perceptions of their landscapes and wider environment, even the resources available in that environment. Postprocessualists looked for explanations outside of adaptation, and kinds of explanations that were not part of processualist thinking. The discontent postprocessualists felt with processualism was extended to Marxian views as well. Marxians, too, tended to think in terms of group agency, not individuals and their choices. Contingency was acknowledged— after all, didn’t Marx say, in essence, that people make history but not under circumstances that they themselves choose? Finally, for us, though scarcely exhaustively, Marxians place too much emphasis on power relations, and in the strictest views, on class conflict and struggle. Hierarchy is certainly significant, but it is as important to question the nature of inequalities, and to see if heterarchies exist, as it is to delineate the nature of hierarchies. Furthermore, there are more aspects to identity than class position, and archeologists should try to uncover as many parts of ancient identities as we can. Some of the other social science theories developing at the time were more palatable to postprocessualists. One was structuration theory, which we covered earlier. In structuration, agency was crucial: the structure both constrains and enables the decisions and actions of individuals. People can make choices, not unrestricted, of course, but choices nonetheless. What could be considered a resource was also constrained by structure, but even here, human choice and decision making were central. For an example we often

Identity  177

used in our classes, students do not eat acorns from the numerous oaks on and surrounding campus, nor the seeds of native grass; and no matter how mysterious the meat in the cafeteria, no one hunted the deer that plague our area, nor the squirrels that scurry everywhere. On the other hand, Native Americans did exploit oaks, grass, deer, and likely smaller mammals as well. Modern people, with the right knowledge about how to prepare acorns, could eat them; we choose not to while Native Americans did. Resources are culturally constructed, as are ways of using them; both are constrained. Aligned with structuration is practice theory, which we have also discussed previously. Practice theory looks in more detail at how people develop strategies for carrying on with life. The strategies are how people, consciously or largely unconsciously, act within their constraining structures. Action arises where agency and structure intersect. We in essence enact, or practice, our lives within a structure that shapes our choices, but doesn’t determine them. Resources are also shaped by structure, and individuals and groups can ­mobilize various resources through choice, but yet are restricted in doing so by their place(s) within society, and the degrees to which they possess or can acquire different sorts of capital: knowledge, wealth, social position. In what follows we will look at four subsets of the ideas that are usually grouped under postprocessualism: first, aspects of identity; second, approaches to meaning based on a discipline known as semiotics; third, phenomenological ways of looking at human experiences; and fourth, what is called the new materiality, which concerns itself with bringing things to the forefront of archaeological study. We will not be looking at methods: the ways of doing fieldwork and analysis developed earlier, and continuing to be developed, have become normalized to the point that all archaeologists no matter what their theoretical persuasion, select from the same repertoire of methods. No field techniques are specific to semiotic analyses, or to the study of identity. Thus, no matter what the theoretical stance on “doing science” that an archaeologist has, that person is quite willing to accept and work with ­natural-science-based ways of obtaining and examining data.

Identity: Feminism and Ethnicity “Identity” is not a singular construct; instead, we all have multiple identities that we draw upon depending on the situations we are in, or what we want to project to the world around us. As archaeologists turned to looking for and at the agency that past individuals exerted, they also began to think about who those agents were. We started with relatively simple things that could be determined by examining skeletons: How old was the person at death? In what kind of health or ill health was that person—were there fresh or healed injuries, marks of physical stress, the signs of specific illnesses such as tuberculosis? Could we determine the sex of the person based on attributes such as bone size and muscle attachment, width of the pelvis, marks on the pubic symphysis of childbirth? And with sex came questions: What does it mean

178 Identity

to “sex” skeletal remains: is the sex determination related to gender? If it is, how is it? In short, could we tell about the dead what most new parents are asked: is it a girl or a boy? And what are the implications of the answer? All of the questions have turned out to be remarkably complex; we hope to unravel some of that complexity here. Some points that thinkers of identity share are first, that identity is socially constructed, and as you might expect, contingent on temporal and cultural factors. That means each of us has a fluid identity, and are managers of the multiple identities we deploy in different circumstances. We exert our agency in forming our identities, but as always are constrained by factors such as our position in society, age, location—in short, aspects of the structures in which we live. Each of us constructs our primary identity out of multiple aspects; this is known as intersectionality. As an example, Pat will use herself. One of her aspects is being a cisgendered female, and heteronormal. She is also a mother, daughter, niece, cousin, and at one time a granddaughter and great-granddaughter; these are social aspects, based on kinship. She is a retired college professor, a still-active field researcher, and a specialist in ceramic analysis using visual inspection, the type–variety–mode form of classification modified to record data pertinent to questions she has about pottery; and enjoys making maps of sites. She started playing the clarinet in 1960, and still plays in a college wind ensemble, although she would hesitate to embrace the label “musician” unless it were preceded by “very amateur.” In addition, she has indulged in a number of crafts over the years: making stuffed dinosaurs, creating scrapbooks, doing needlepoint, and now making wreaths to decorate the doors of her very old relatives. Still, when asked what she does, she says, I’m an archaeologist—not, I do archaeology, or I teach anthropology and I’m a mother of two. She can discuss the aspects of intersectionality, for example, being a working female archaeologist is different from being a working, but male, archaeologist, her principle identification is her profession as a central characteristic, perhaps the characteristic, of her perceived self. Identity is not something reserved for individuals: groups have identity as well. Some aspects of group identity may hinge on the same ones out of which individual identities are created: age, for example, or occupation. Others are more characteristic of groups. Examples of this sort include factions, political parties, ethnic affiliation, or voluntary associations such as clubs or sports teams (or their supporters). There are so many aspects to identity that we will examine one for individuals—sex/gender—and one for groups—ethnicity.

Sex, Gender, and Archaeological Interpretation During the heyday of processual archaeology, questions of sex and gender were not at the forefront of inquiries, with the exception of situations where investigations could be aided by texts. Skeletal analysis could, possibly, determine the sex of a skeleton, and from that gender was extrapolated, based on the assumption that the two—sex and gender—were essentially the same.

Identity  179

Sex (and gender) could be seen as well in representations such as figurines, sculpture, murals, and painted pottery. When gender studies, starting with feminist approaches, began to make inroads into archaeology the field entered a period that is often called, facetiously, “add women and stir.” We attempted to “see” women archaeologically through the lenses mentioned above: skeletons and representations. Using ethnographic analogy, particularly in regions where the direct ­h istorical approach was possible (Mesoamerica, for example) many thought that we could figure out what kinds of activities women engaged in, and on that basis, determine the sexual division of labor. These attempts were largely atheoretical. By that we mean that there was little contemplation of what the terms “sex” and “gender” might mean in larger senses. Did saying a deceased person was a woman mean that she was heterosexual? How would she have seen herself as a person? Although feminist theory was, and had been, addressing questions of the social construction of gender, this approach’s theoretical precepts had little impact on archaeological analysis. These early attempts to see women were also for the most part androcentric. This term means that the point of view was from a male stance, male as defined in societies that produced archaeologists. When we were in college, the word “man” was assumed to be generic, covering all humans (though Pat never accepted this, and irritated professors with different constructions such as s/he, or writing in the plural). Activities performed by men in ethnographically known societies were assumed to be male in antiquity, and indeed, male-associated modern activity allocations were often projected into the past. Men made things, women had children; men acquired food, women cooked and served it. Gender, if considered at all, was not a particularly significant variable because the division of labor among the supposedly two clearly d­ efined genders was everywhere the same. The questions that shaped archeological inquiry, then, were largely based in Western cultures, concerned with norms of behavior rather than variation, and heterosexuality was considered to be one of the dominant norms. As archaeologists saw it, feminist thinking had little to do with their thinking. One of the most telling examples of this was the idea of Man the Hunter, a model prevalent in the 1960s, and one that we studied. The model did turn attention away from complex societies, a more general term than “civilization,” to the ways of living that dominated human development for millions of years. This formulation is based on a number of assumptions. First is the major importance of men as providers of food, particularly protein acquired by capturing and killing animals. Second, animal protein was thought to be essential for nutrition, and the basis for some changes seen in human evolution. It is true that animal protein provides a lot of concentrated calories in protein and the fats needed for the development of a nervous system. Access to such concentrated nutrients was thought to have promoted and supported the growth of large brains. And meat tastes good to most people, and so was

180 Identity

quite enjoyable. Third, of course, only men had the strength and stamina to bring down and carry home meat, especially from large creatures. Fourth, men made stone tools, and therefore were responsible for objects that were essential for survival—especially tools for hunting. So the result was a ­focus on what was thought to be a male activity of crucial importance to our ­evolution and then to maintaining health and wellbeing, hunting. In addition, ideas about male characteristics were projected into the past. Men, it was argued, are naturally aggressive, and that aggression is ­well-­channeled into a violent activity such as killing game. Men performed prestigious activities, such as sharing the meat from hunting. By sharing, they could manipulate resource distribution and therefore influence social ­organization, perhaps even mating and thus the conception of children. So men brought attention to themselves, and cemented prestige by bringing home, if not the bacon, then the deer or gazelle. This idea suffered somewhat when ethnographic studies of contemporary foragers pointed to other conclusions. First, the bulk of calories came from plant materials, and occasional finds of very small animals. This was determined by careful study of the caloric intake of living foragers (also known then as hunters and gatherers). Second, these sorts of foods were continually acquired and distributed by women, their work assisted in many cases by children. Third, hunting was often sporadic, especially the sort of intense, high-energy hunting needed to bring down large animals. Fourth, a division of labor between male hunting and female gathering is not universal. In short, based on ethnographic analogy, most of what people ate before we came to rely on domesticated plants and animals came from wild plants, found and harvested by women. Projecting back into time unsupported ideas about subsistence organization likely resulted in an inaccurate view of our ancient forager ancestors. So came the view of Woman the Gatherer as our main defense against hunger. Overtly feminist archaeologists were at the forefront of professionals who began addressing the simple “add women and stir” approach, pointing out the androcentric stance inherent in most processual accounts of the past. But what is “feminism”? Feminism began as a social movement in the 1800s. Feminists then were concerned with equality: working conditions and pay for women; the right to vote; and beginning to question the sex/gender hierarchy structuring so much of people’s lives. By the time feminist archaeologists entered the field, the question of voting had largely been resolved, but the other issues remained. Their work was explicitly informed by feminist theory, and can be seen in the projects of the founding mothers of feminist archaeology: ­Margaret Conkey, Joan Gero, and Janet Spector (see Box 8.1). Feminist archaeology has not been just about women; rather, attention has been directed to both categories as seen in Western cultures. The androcentrism mentioned above—in a simple form, the use of the so-called generic “man”—was questioned. From this, feminists moved to the position

Identity  181

that we need to look at many sorts of differentiation in groups: men and women, young and old, able-bodied and differently-abled individuals. The larger point is that by centering men, we had developed a distorted view of the past, marginalizing many different sorts of people and their lived realities. In addition, feminists argued that the field had concentrated too much on special situations at the expense of everyday life; for example, looking at contexts such as burials rather than basic behavior such as cooking and eating, or sleeping, or child-rearing. Furthermore, thinking about and analyzing overarching systems limited studies of the past to a macro-scale, when people lived their lives at micro-scales. For example, looking at sites as a whole ­obscured smaller units, such as households or craft-working zones. The theoretical stances of feminist archaeologists are many, too many to delineate here. Instead, we would like to mention a number of practices derived from feminist thought that have become significant for, if not completely embedded in, contemporary archaeology. First, we want to stress that a person doesn’t have to be female to be a feminist archaeologist, or a feminist of any sort. Men can be, and are, feminists in personal life, and male archaeologists apply feminist thought to their work. Second, feminism points out that all knowledge is situated and socially constructed. We have talked about social construction before, so let’s look

Box 8.1  Margaret Conkey In December 2017, Margaret (Meg) Conkey received the Thomas H. Huxley Memorial Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute, UK, for her contributions to science. The field component of her work has focused on the European Paleolithic: her long-term project in the French Pyrénées, Between the Caves, has recovered thousands of artifacts from the area’s sites. Another abiding interest is Paleolithic art, for, paraphrasing one of her comments, the past isn’t just about who had the best tools. Conkey is one of the most significant figures in the founding and growth of feminist approaches in archaeology, along with Joan Gero and Janet Spector; she has written prolifically on all aspects of feminism in archaeology from interpreting sites and artifacts to the conduct of ­research. Colleagues commenting on her tenure at UC-Berkeley mention her inclusiveness, how she recruited underserved groups to study in the department, and how she has adhered to those and other feminist principles throughout her career. Conkey’s generous good humor comes out in many ways: in discussing the Huxley Medal, she expressed her profound appreciation for the award, and also remarked that it was a pleasure to diversify the group of recipients, who were all male.

182 Identity

at “situated.” What we learn and know as people is based on our positions in society. If people are raised as Catholics, as we were, they are less likely to understand Protestantism of any sort than those raised in a Protestant denomination. If we are part of an occupational group, say ironworkers, we are unlikely to know much about nuclear medicine. Our elderly parents never really learned how to use cell phones, while our children are always pointing out smart phone features that we do not use, but they think we ought to. Because of the situated nature of knowledge, expanding our ideas may take deliberate action on our part. This is particularly true if learning takes us out of our comfort zone, say learning statistics when we are not adept at math, or studying the philosophy of science even when we have to look up terms and definitions quite often. Third, feminist archaeology puts a premium on specific ethical norms. We should be accountable to our research subjects—this is difficult of course since archaeological subjects are usually deceased. There can be descendent populations, however, to whom we owe allegiance and transparency. Even if there are not direct descendants, local residents have a stake in archeological research, and their concerns must be taken into account. They also deserve to know about what we find in the literal sense, and what we think about those finds after we have analyzed them. We also need to be accountable to the dead: for instance, trying to see ancient people in their own terms rather than projecting contemporary norms into the past—as was done with man the hunter. As part of ethical conduct, archaeologists need to shape their research as collaborative efforts, with students, colleagues, and local people. We need to be egalitarian with participants, especially students, giving them the opportunity to learn and do a variety of tasks. This runs counter to what is still too often the case: women do lab work, men carry out excavations and surveys. If you doubt this, look at studies of what sorts of grants go to men and women—women are still less likely to be funded for non-laboratory projects than are men. The last part of ethical conduct is giving credit where credit is due: if a student supervised the excavation of a lithic workshop, the project director has no right to take credit for that work. Local people who do actual excavation and processing of finds, as is the case with our programs, should be thanked in publications, at the least. A fifth aspect of deliberately feminist work is revisionism. This means that investigators need to change their theoretical perspectives when it is clear that the one under which research was initially conducted does not seem to work. That is, rather than continuing to emphasize one perspective at the expense of others, we need to be aware that changing our minds is not a sign of theoretical inconsistency or “weakness,” but instead is a strength, the strength to say, I was wrong, or I need to change. Revisionism also relates to changing one’s methods when those being used do not produce desired or necessary data. This is easier than admitting to less-than-useful ideas, but can still make for difficult choices.

Identity  183

Sixth, feminist archaeologists are committed to putting gender studies in the mainstream of archaeological inquiry, and keeping them there. Feminism and how it shapes archaeology is not a fad, and should not be, once again, relegated to the fringes of archeological discourse. Studies of publications indicate that gender studies are not yet exactly one of the main currents in archaeology, and also show that women tend to be ghettoized as the people who “do” gender. Moreover, articles about gender are more often in less-prestigious journals than in the most prominent ones—and there are significant differences in hiring, promotion, and salary between male and female archaeologists, another concern of feminist archaeologists. Feminist archaeology is not without its critics—no approach is. Criticisms of feminist archaeology are like those leveled at feminism in general. If feminists speak only of female–male, or woman–man, they are perpetuating a binary view of human existence. Binaries are not part of postmodernist thought, since they do not reflect the complexities of the real world and of individual experiences within it. Binary male–female distinctions are, moreover, characteristic of Western views, and are not necessarily shared by other cultures. Feminist thought has also been criticized for being too tied up with Western conceptions in other ways. As feminism developed, little attention was initially paid to people of color, and virtually none to Indigenous people. In addition, ideas put forth by folks who were not from the United States, the United Kingdom, or western Europe rarely impinged on feminist theory; such perspectives are now called transnational feminism. The standard binaries also ignored non-binary self-identification, particularly the points of view of lesbian and gay individuals. Sexuality in general was not considered. Finally, feminism first developed in the middle and upper classes: there was, initially, no working-class feminism. So, although feminist archaeology was trying to break free of typical approaches, it was still embedded in a pervasive Western, middle class, largely white world view. As with man the hunter, ethnographic studies have provided ways to think about issues with feminist archaeology. There are quite a few accounts of groups who do not ascribe to a dichotomous version of gender or sex. For example, in some Native American and First Nations groups there is an identity called in English “two-spirit.” While this is for some a Pan-Native American term for non-binary individuals, in those groups where such individuals exist, or existed, the term usually refers to a man who chooses to dress like a woman and perform typical female-gendered tasks, or a woman who chooses to dress as a man and engage in activities usually confined to men. There are not necessarily any implications for sexual orientation: two-spirit individuals may have same or opposite-sex relations. Two-spirit is also used as a more generic term to refer to those who are third gender, neither male nor female according to the mores of their group. There are other specific examples of different gender categories outside of North America. The hijras of South Asia are recognized as a distinct gender in India and Bangladesh. These individuals start life as male-bodied or

184 Identity

intersex people, and as they get older gravitate to all-hijra communities. Some hijra groups have specialized occupational roles, such as singing at weddings. ­Hijras who are male-bodied may choose to undergo modification of their genitals; others do not. The sexual orientation of hijras most often falls under our category of homosexual, but even here our terms for sexual activity do not adequately convey hijra standards of behavior. On the island of Sulawesi, ­Indonesia, the Bulgis recognize five genders. One corresponds to Western ideas of female heterosexual, another to male heterosexual. A third refers to women who choose to dress like men, take up male occupations, and refuse to follow customs such as the one prohibiting women from walking alone at night. The fourth gender encompasses male-bodied individuals who choose to dress like women and pursue traditionally female activities. In both these cases, individuals tend to see themselves physically as male or female, and do not wish to change their bodies. Nonetheless, they do not follow the gendered roles assigned to women and men. The fifth category is made of individuals with ambiguous genitalia, what we would call intersexed. These people are considered a combination of male and female in both physical and non-physical terms. They are sacred, and have special roles, such as performing blessing ceremonies. Our point in talking about non-binary sex and gender categories is this: if we assume that our categories are universal, we will be unlikely to look for or recognize situations that are different in past groups. Not that it would be easy to see such variation; on the contrary, it is difficult—and at times very hard even to see what we assume are standard binaries.

Queer Theory The theoretical underpinnings of an expansive approach to sex and gender began with feminism, but have been amplified by ideas that are combined under the rubric of queer theory. The general aim of queer theory is to question and destabilize categories, particularly Western ones that are assumed to be universal. Queer theorists point out, as an example, that even the medical condition of “intersexuality”—not to speak of male and female—is culturally constructed. As we have seen, among the Bulgis of Sulawesi, people with ambiguous genitalia or genitals that combine biologically female and male characteristics are simply accepted as a different category. In the West, such folks often had “corrective” surgery in infancy to place them in a category that parents and medical personnel thought appropriate. Westerners have typically defined people with ambiguous genitals not as an accepted third category, but as a group to be altered. More recently there has developed a movement to prevent surgical alteration and allow intersex people to choose surgery, if they wish to, later in life. This position is not entirely accepted in our society-at-large, but the presence of intersex people is something that archaeologists need to think about. Queer theory also emphasizes the performativity of gender. As with other aspects of identity, gender needs to be communicated through activity, and

Identity  185

with actions we consolidate and solidify our personal ideas about gender and how we see our own gender. Gender is also fluid: in different situations we may decide to emphasize or de-emphasize gendered aspects, perhaps a woman going to a professional meeting choosing to dress in a suit with a scarf tied much like a man’s tie, while in another situation she might choose a more “feminine” cocktail dress worn with high heels or, to present a perhaps more ambiguous image, wearing Manolo Blahniks with a severe suit, or military boots with a slinky dress. Our choices about how we present ourselves concern how we perform who we are, indicating to others and ourselves how we see our identities. Needless to say, those choices are still culturally constructed. The term intersectionality has already been introduced, and you will ­recall that it refers to how individual characteristics of our identity ­cross-cut and combine with one another. In the Pat example, she is both a ­professional ­archaeologist and a caring niece for elderly relatives. These ­aspects are not ­contradictory or unrelated: while she wouldn’t call herself an ­archaeology-niece, or a niece-y archaeologist, those aspects of self do ­combine in her overall identity. To sum up, any attempt to study identity is problematic if not grounded in theory. Feminist and queer theory are not the only ways to look at individual identity, but they are the two bodies of thought that we have chosen to highlight. Any way of looking at identity should question assumptions based in Western modes of thought. The division of labor that seems normal for us is not universal, so we need to step outside of our ingrained perspectives to be able to see something different. The several points that we want readers to take from this section are these: Identity is socially constructed. It is fluid, and is the result of choice, conscious or unconscious. Within the binaries that permeate standard Western ideas about sex and gender there are actually continuities. We may not have terms for segments of the continuities, but other ethnographically known cultures do separate continuities into categories that we do not have. To expand our understanding of the past, archaeologists need to be ready to move away from Western conceptions, to at least try to see different ways of being in the past. Feminist archaeology is more likely these days to be called gender ­archaeology—that is a more inclusive term. An investigator need not be a feminist to pursue questions of gender, but many, if not most, people who inquire about sex and gender in the past are feminists. In addition to theoretical positions and the studies arising from them, gender archaeology has called attention to issues of practice in archaeology, as well as problems with the discipline itself. While a majority of students in anthropology programs, including archaeology tracks, are women, men still predominate in tenure-track and tenured positions; the further up the academic ranks we look, the fewer women there are. Many major universities employ few, if any, women archaeologists, and everywhere there are pay inequities and differences in funding and publication. Women seem to disappear from archaeology somewhere in

186 Identity

the pipeline between graduate school and full employment; this is a problem in many respects, first of all in a loss of varied perspectives. Feminism and queer theory say that we should be questioning the intellectual basis of archeology, its investigative practices, and its position in the academy, museums, and businesses such as firms carrying out environmental impact contracts. We agree.

Groups and Identity Studying groups is scarcely a new way to look at the past, but the groups with which we populate the past have changed over time: in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we looked for the roots of modern nation-states in cultural groups that were defined by shared norms of language and custom. Related to this approach, we studied civilizations, defined by characteristics such as a developed art style, monumental architecture, and writing. In the culture history chapter, we talked about archaeological cultures, defined largely by spatial distributions of artifacts and attributes. Those patterns were thought to reflect the operation of underlying assumptions about life and behavior that defined a group’s culture and distinguished it from others. In the latter half of the twentieth century, archaeology followed cultural anthropology by looking at groups that fragmented the supposed uniformity of cultures. These included factions, voluntary associations—think clubs, such as the Girl or Boy Scouts, or Veterans of Foreign Wars—occupational specialists, and class. A common focus became the ethnic group; in fact, some cultural anthropologists suggested that the term “ethnicity” should replace the ever-problematic term and concept of culture. Ethnicity, however, is a disputed term, and may even be seen as disreputable: it is associated with colonialism, and the designations colonizers imposed on the societies they encountered. It is also a term that was abused in the twentieth century: in Nazi Germany the idea that there was a distinct Germanic people, a nation (in the old sense) or ethnicity that existed through time was used to justify taking over neighboring territories. In fact, invasions were partly justified by associating specific attributes and artifacts with the ancient “Germans,” both with and without the complicity of archaeologists. On the other hand, a more positive use of ethnicity in the previous and this century is employing the term to assert indigenous claims to territories taken from them by outsiders. Both culture and ethnicity are used in archaeology, with ethnicity considered more specific and associated with smaller units that are usually parts of larger groups, such as civilizations, complex societies, or culture areas and regions. There are two views of what makes an ethnic group. The first, older, and now uncommon, can be called a primordial or essentialist view. These terms indicate something inherent at birth that is reinforced by upbringing.

Identity  187

Anthropology has discarded the idea that ethnic characteristics are inborn and so has turned to the concepts of instrumental and constructivist ethnicity. Instrumental ethnicity is pragmatic; while it is not exactly equivalent to a constructivist view, we will not differentiate the two here. Ethnicity in this version is made by practice: through choice—agency—we behave in ways that create and enforce an ethnic identity. Such an entity may be situationally specific, that is, useful and used in some circumstances but not in others. An example would be Maya people in Mexico and Central America today calling on their ethnic identities to pursue land claims with their governments. In other situations, however, some people of Mayan descent would prefer to be associated with a nation as a whole, and could then refer to themselves as Mexican, Guatemalan, or Honduran. In still others, they might stress their affiliation with a particular village, distinguishing it and themselves from other Mayas. Ethnicity can be self-ascribed, that is, chosen by oneself, or it can be attributed to people by others. These examples constitute a continuum; in some cases your ethnicity may be imposed on you, while in others you have a greater latitude for choice. In Honduras there are groups of people who descend both from Native people and Africans brought to the area by Europeans. Many Hondurans simply view such individuals as Black, which is an imposed identity, though not an ethnic one. Some members of these groups call themselves Afro-decendientes, that is, people of African descent. At the same time, the group can emphasize their Native heritage by using the name Garifuna. This term references their combined African and Native ancestors. Garifuna in Honduras are also Hondureños (citizens of the nation-state of Honduras). This situation illustrates points about modern ethnicity: we can be parts of more than one ethnic group; and ethnic groups can be nested like Russian dolls, with larger categories including smaller ones—Black and indigenous or Native are subsumed by Garifuna, which is in turn part of a Honduran identity, and at higher levels, we find Central American, Latin American, New World, and/or Western Hemisphere. There is also a strategic quality to this use of ethnicity. Instrumentalist perspectives on this form of group identity, as the name implies, view ethnicity as a tool that is deployed as a means to achieve a goal that the group agrees is valuable. Garifuna is thus the identity that is stressed when trying to defend local rights to land from developers by emphasizing long-standing claims to ancestral territory versus the self-interested efforts of interlopers. Anthropologists have outlined a number of performances that can mark ethnic groups and boundaries. These include those involving clothing, food preparation and sharing, customs (such as holidays), religion, language, celebrations of ancestry, recognition of kinship, and marriage patterns. Recall that for archaeology, identity markers need to be materialized or instantiated for them to be accessible to us. So, one of the most important issues is, if ethnic groups existed in the past, how can we recognize them archaeologically? With written records or many artistic representations of people, the

188 Identity

problem becomes somewhat easier. Still, material remains that instantiate or materialize ethnic characteristics must not simply have existed in the past, but must have been preserved to this day. In Mesoamerica, we know that Precolumbian people relied on corn; but how did they eat it—as tamales, tortillas, stews—or drink it, as beer? How do we know what foodways can be associated with specific groups? The essential question, then, is whether or not ethnicity is a useful term for archaeologists. It might be possible to “see” ethnic groups through the patterns of material culture; but still, did ancient populations view themselves in these terms? Attempts to address the issue of material patterns and ethnicity have come from ethnoarchaeology. Studies have been done on decorations used by modern groups, to see if patterning in these material styles is congruent with language groups, spatial groups, or units with which the people studied self-identify. Such studies indicate that some attributes of material culture can indicate ethnic identification, while others do not. This leaves archaeologists who study the past with a conundrum: how can we tell what represents ethnicity and what does not? There is no clear answer to this question. Because the term is now recognized to be problematic in both cultural anthropology and archaeology, it is little used today. We—anthropologists and archaeologists—do talk about ethnogenesis. This word refers to the development of new populations with new identities who emerged from previously existing groups. For example, we can think about the evolving nature of Garifuna as a process of ethnogenesis as two previously existing groups—Africans and Native Carib groups—came together, united, changed in tandem, and came to be a distinct group with characteristics drawn from their antecedents. The search for ethnic groups in the past may well be misguided, especially in the absence of written accounts that point to their existence at specific moments and indicate how their boundaries were materially marked. The danger is the same as in the study of past genders. We run the risk of finding what we think must be there. In the case of ethnicity, every spatial pattern in material styles is easily interpreted as a marker of ethnic distinction. If we follow that route we find ourselves filling the past with distinct ethnic groups, each characterized by their unique material styles, that start to look a lot like the cultures defined by culture historians in the early to middle twentieth century. As with studies of gender, however, there are important lessons to be learned from the study of ethnicity. To us, the most significant of these is the recognition that cultures are not homogeneous, defined by universal adherence among their members to a set of beliefs, or norms, that guides everyone’s actions in the same ways. Rather, cultures are divided by various factors. Gender identification is one basis for these divisions but, as Pat’s example of intersectionality illustrates, there are many others. All of these, ranging from class to occupation, to locality, can by themselves or in combination be the

Identity  189

bases for varied social identities that may have little or nothing to do with our modern conceptions of ethnicity. The example given in Chapter 7 of the people who lived at Sites 175, 470, and 471 in the Naco Valley suggests that these individuals were simultaneously divided by rank (as measured by the differing sizes of their residences), while united by economic interdependencies. In the process of making and sharing the ceramics and ground stone tools they fabricated, occupants of these three settlements may well have been performing a shared identity. Was it ethnic? Probably not. What is important is that studies of ethnicity opened the door to perceiving the complex ways in which people can be united and divided within and across cultures as they variably enact affiliations of diverse sorts through the use of a multiplicity of materials. It’s up to you if you want to go through that door even if you do not take ethnicity with you as you formulate your inferences to the best explanation of what you find. One concept you may want to take with you is that of community. A community is a group of individuals united by locality and common practices, much like those living at Sites 175, 470, and 471 in the previous example. The use of community avoids some of the problems embedded in ethnicity such as figuring out language and foodways and deciding whether those practices were charged with ethnic meanings by those who engaged in them. Still, do not be lulled into the notion that within communities all people lived lives of quiet conformity. As noted in the example given above, some of those who lived at Site 175 resided in relatively grand accommodations, bespeaking a level of power not matched by those occupying humble abodes at that settlement and its near neighbors. Pay attention to differences within any social unit, as feminists and students of ethnicity urge us to do. It is in identifying those distinctions that we can begin to formulate inferences to the best explanation that are close to the lived experiences of those we study. This attention to intra-cultural difference is also a positive legacy of postmodernism.

An Archaeological Example An example of many of the issues discussed above comes from the site in Belize known as Chan. Characterized as an agrarian village, Chan is said to have been populated by “commoners,” that large group who, for a variety of reasons are not “elite.” (C. Blackmore 2011; see Suggested Readings for the full citation). Blackmore investigated three clusters of structures in the Chan Northeast group: NE-1, NE-3, and NE-6. All had long sequences of occupation, construction, and remodeling, but NE-1 and NE-6 were smaller than NE-3, with platforms more scattered, lower in height, and with less volume. Of the three, NE-6 showed the least investment in construction and remodeling. Analysis of artifacts showed other differences. NE-3 had higher percentages of serving wares as well as finely decorated taxa. Serving wares indicate

190 Identity

food given to others, likely in feasting activities. That group also had the most artifacts associated with ritual activity, in particular, public rituals. NE-1 was not without valuable materials: found there were jade pieces and worked shell generally seen as representing rulership, authority, and fertility. These items were uncovered in the private contexts of burials, and even in public situations their display would not have been obvious Residents of small structure groups like these three are, by virtue of ethnographic analogy, peasants. The designation implies poverty, lack of independence from superiors, engagement in farming: all in all, people “less than” the elites. Blackmore wanted to queer this characterization, to upend the assumptions that folks living and working in small structures belonged to a largely undifferentiated class at the bottom of a hierarchy. Not only do the artifacts found across these three structure groups differ in quantity and kind, the excavated platforms evince differences. NE-3 is set up so that it is relatively open to view, something congruent with the serving vessels and ritual paraphernalia. NE-1 had been founded earlier than the other groups, and likely benefitted from the prominence given to pioneers of a piece of land in lowland Maya sites. That the NE-1 residents could draw on more labor is also seen in the differences in constructions sequences: NE-3 and -6 were expanded and remodeled seldom compared to NE-1. By throwing out assumptions about rural populations—rejecting the preconceived idea that such people were universally poor, perhaps oppressed, peasants—Blackmore queered the questions asked. She chose to analyze the residents in detail using several lines of evidence. The lines converged on this point: there is much more differentiation amongst these farmers than anyone expected. Looking at their identities through the lens of queer theory suggests that more archaeologists should be throwing out assumptions, queering their questions, and therefore getting new and often unexpected answers.

Naco and Difference When we returned to work in the valley in the late 1980s, we hoped to be able to address some of the concerns of feminist approaches, but thought we would at least be able to look at skeletons from burials. Neither happened. The soils of the valley are hostile to much organic material, and markedly adverse to bone preservation. Additionally, there must have been cemeteries somewhere in the valley, because ancient residents apparently did not follow common Mesoamerican practices such as burial around or in structures. The skeletal material we did locate came from about 30 people, based on the minimum number of individuals in the remains. Most of the skeletal material could not be classified by sex. There were no goods interred with the Precolumbian residents we did find in excavations. Artifacts associated with burials do not necessarily reflect

Identity  191

their occupation or sex or gender, but we would have been happy to try to make such identifications—if we could have studied those offerings. The valley does have a goodly sample of human depictions on figurines, ocarinas, and whistles. Women are indicated by breasts and skirts, while male attire is much more varied. Males often carry things, such as weapons or standards, but female figures carry either nothing, babies, or bowls, although sometimes the bowls have round appliqués that look like muffins or biscuits; perhaps tamales are intended. From the depictions we have, very little can be said about ancient gender definitions or relations. Finally, painted versions of people appear only on non-local ceramics, which tell us little or nothing about the humans in the Naco Valley. Feminist ideas about difference have permeated our thoughts, as mentioned above, as have ideas about ethnicity. One conclusion from the study of the birds painted on some locally made pottery is that a specific bird found on local polychrome and bichrome (vessels with two colors) bowls might be related just to Naqueños. Other birds found on red-on-natural painted jars made in the basin resemble those seen rarely on similar containers elsewhere. Depending on the bird and where it appears, these avian images might have signaled relationships between distinct groups living in different valleys (those on the red-pained jars) or materialized unity among those living in the Late and Terminal Classic Naco Valley (the birds adorning polychrome and bichrome-decorated bowls). Using images on painted pottery we postulated that the valley’s residents were, through the distinctive birds, signaling their shared identity, and through the red-on-natural birds, indicating more widely flung associations. Perhaps the valley’s population saw themselves as an ethnic group, but we hesitate to use that term because of all that goes with it. No one knows for certain what language(s) was spoken by Precolumbian people in what is now western Honduras, but Lenca has been suggested. Are there other shared “ethnic” markers? The clothing, headdresses, and hairstyles might be markers, but of what is not clear. What is emerging, however, is a picture of difference that does not easily fit with the concept of ethnicity. Instead, people actively used distinct styles to convey and constitute their relations to diverse others within and beyond the Naco Valley during the Late and Terminal Classic. In sum, “seeing” sex, gender, and ethnicity just has not worked for us, although we believe that differences in wealth, status, and power can be determined. As our earlier example indicates, we also think that at times we can identify communities, but that depends on having done excavations at a cluster of sites—sometimes we got that sort of data, but not that often. What we have taken from the approaches in this section are ideas about the conduct of research. Ours has always been collaborative, especially with students at levels from undergraduates to PhD candidates. We give credit to those who worked with us, and have never put our names on others’ research or insisted that we be included as subsidiary authors just because we the work.

192 Identity

While the proverbial buck has to stop somewhere, and for us it was with us as directors, and we did have a hierarchy of directors and excavation supervisors, our aim as teachers was to get students to take charge of their own projects, from deciding where to excavate or what kind of cultural investigation to pursue, to writing a field report, and then a final report in the following semesters. We wanted participants to find out something about themselves, as well as learn about past and present Central Americans, as they worked in the field. To us, those are feminist goals, and well worth the pursuit.

9 Looking at Meaning Semiotics

Another aspect of postprocessual archaeology is looking at symbols and what they might mean: what sorts of meaning we can see in the past, and, we hope, what meanings ancient peoples gave to or saw in their worlds. This is known as the interpretive approach, and once again, it isn’t quite a school since there are numerous views within this category. Here we will focus on a selection of what interpretation includes: semiotics, the philosophy of signs. Another name for this approach is the semiotic turn in archaeology. As noted earlier, there are no methods unique to the semiotic approach. There are instead questions, ways of looking at the past, suggestions of how to tease out interesting aspects of what came before. In addition, we will not be talking about how we tested these ideas in the Naco Valley, because we did not: the work we have done on symbols and meaning has occurred after fieldwork; some of it is still in the “This is interesting—where does it go?” stage. We have published little using ideas from this way of looking at the past but may do so in the future.

Symbols When looking at meaning, archaeologists think about symbols, as do many practitioners of other disciplines. Symbols, also known in some approaches as signs, are in essence anything that we believe holds meaning. Of course, our determinations are etic, from without—what we think is a sign may not have been one to ancient peoples. On the other hand, we hope that our identifications match in some way the symbols past peoples used; that is, we hope that we are getting at an emic perspective. All schools of archaeological thought have looked at symbols in some way. How symbols figure in inferences to the best explanation differs across these approaches. For example, culture historians examined the spatial distribution of material styles, treating them as symbols that could be used to delineate culture areas or regions. As discussed in Chapter 3, our work on ­ceramics follows in the tradition of type-variety analysis, which relies in part on ­decoration to define analytical units. We use regularly recurring modes— colors, content of designs, placement of decoration, and so forth—as the bases

194  Looking at Meaning: Semiotics

of categories. We choose the modes, but hope that they reflect ancient patterns of perception and thought. Modes are used in many fields to characterize styles. Think about how we know a painting is an example of Renaissance art as opposed to the twentieth-century style cubism. Styles are sets of characteristics, then, that are indicative of time, place, and workshops, as a few examples. In our pottery, red paint is combined with incision on several categories of vessels. These two decorative modes are found throughout central and western Honduras, but because of slight differences in, say, line width, placement of the paint and incision, the depth and width of the incised lines, whether incision was made with a comb-like, multi-toothed instrument or an item with a single point, and other modes, an experienced analyst can look at even a fairly small piece of a jar and be able to place it in time and space. Incision and red-painted designs look crowded on vessels from the site of Copán compared to our Naco ones, and similar vessels from Santa Barbara look different in the details of design and design placement yet again. We surmise, but cannot prove, that Copán valley residents could and did see incised-­a nd-red-painted jars from Santa Barbara, Naco, and their own valley as similar and yet they knew the differences among these vessels as well as their points of origin. For processualists, symbols are ways to get at human behavior. Signs can convey information that at times represent reality and at times relate to abstractions. We have large jars, sometimes found buried in the earth at the edges of structure platforms. These buried jars, and fragments of jars from other contexts, often have applied to their surfaces one or two thin rolls of clay. After application, the potter then used a finger to make indentations in the clay; these applied items are reminiscent of waves, and we have seen them as indicating water. Burying a jar is one way to keep water cool, and the association of the wavy appliques with large buried jars has led us to think that the applique itself means “water,” and on a jar it indicates “water jar,” a functional category. In general, however, processualists reduced meaning to function; an artifact’s most significant meaning related to the roles it filled in promoting a culture’s adaptation. In the processual approach, symbols are also associated with differences in wealth and power. In the Naco area, an application of fine-grained clay—at times mixed with powdered limestone—to the exterior of a wattle-and-daub building may function as some protection against water damage. This thin plastering is uncommon, and it is almost always a different color from the building wall. Such wall treatments may thus signify wealth and power differences in addition to being a functional improvement on an unplastered wall. Either way it tells us things about human behavior: the previous residents of the valley knew about different sources of clay, deposits of limestone, how a plaster coating can protect a wall, and perhaps that a person had to be of some importance in order to have a plastered house. Once again, the significance of these power differentials is ultimately rooted in the roles leaders played in

Looking at Meaning: Semiotics  195

organizing societies to perform the tasks needed for the group to survive. Style, whether on pottery on buildings, functions to facilitate adaptation. In Marxian approaches, symbols do not simply represent power—they are themselves the stuff of power. Signs can be manipulated by factions, and can obfuscate differences that elites and perhaps others do not want their compatriots to notice (see the earlier discussion of ideology). In this view, symbols are part of what constitutes power. Applying this theory, we see the differential distributions of complexly-decorated pottery as supporting and reproducing hierarchy. It also seems to be a way of cementing class and power differences: central elites could obtain and redistribute fine pottery to bind others in a patron–client relationship following the lines of prestige goods theory. For those following structuration theory, the point of symbols is similar: symbols are resources, a kind of cultural capital that can be used in various ways to advance the agendas of different factions. As we’ve seen in the preceding section, researchers concerned with gender also consider symbols. Signs can indicate sex and gender directly, just as symbols can indicate a group’s ethnic affiliation. In semiotic approaches, however, symbols are not just about behavior or the materialization of power. They are important in and of themselves, and are even more important in relation to humans because humans generate and use symbols. The semiotic turn, and interpretivism in general, are aspects of the postmodernist ideas we discussed in Chapter 8. The term “semiotics” is defined as the study of meanings, and the discipline is related to linguistic analysis. Like linguistics, semiotics is concerned with how humans generate symbols and systems of symbols. Unlike linguistics, however, semiotic studies are not limited to language, but include anything that can be regarded as a symbol. Paraphrasing Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the founders of semiotics (see Box 9.1), a sign is an item that stands for something to a given person. The ways a sign can stand for something are many, as are the items that can be signs. We have just mentioned Pierce, one of the founders of semiotics. The other is Ferdinand de Saussure (see Box 9.2). Below we present basic information about both their approaches, and discuss how semiotics is related to archaeological interpretation.

Saussure and Structuralism For Saussure, language is a cultural construct. Whether words are written or spoken, they can be understood only in context. Saussure was interested in the elements that make up language, and focused on the differences between elements: he believed that differences, rather than similarities, defined the elements. He also saw semiotic structures in terms of binaries. The first important binary is signifier and signified, in other terms, the relationship between the word that is the sign, and the item that the word refers to. The relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary—no natural connection exists. The connection is, instead, a cultural construction.

196  Looking at Meaning: Semiotics Box 9.1  Charles Sanders Peirce Co-founder of semiology is Charles Sanders Peirce, although he ­preferred the term “semeiology” for his own work. Semeiology, for Peirce, was the study of signs broadly construed, an eminently l­ogical process for him, and incorporating the formal study of logic. Since Peirce’s ideas are covered in some length in this chapter, here we ­provide a ­biographical sketch to place him in historical and ­intellectual context. Peirce was born in 1829 and lived until 1914. He was an ­indifferent student, usually in the lowest 25 percent of his class when formally enrolled, for example at Harvard. Nonetheless, he had a precocious intellect. He began independent studies of logic at the age of 12 or 13, and at 16 he took on the study of philosophy. He did manage to graduate from Harvard with a degree in chemistry, and subsequently finished a master’s degree there. His father, a mathematician, was one of the founders of the United States Coast and Geodesic survey, and Peirce himself spent 32 years working for this government institution. Projects there allowed him to use his interests in science, and more importantly, kept food on his first wife’s table, and shelter over their heads. When he left the Survey, he became destitute, and relied on freelance writing, some consulting and translation, and for a short time taught math at Johns Hopkins University. He found it difficult to find work in part because of his “scandalous” behavior: while still married, he began living with another woman—bad enough, but a situation made worse because she was considered part of a despised minority, Gypsies. Nonetheless, they eventually married and she shared his impoverished world for the rest of his life. Although we archaeologists know Peirce mainly for his work in linguistics, particularly his triadic construction of signs, he was a profound thinker on many subjects: how science works in actual practice; evolution; formal logic; probability and statistics; and many more aspects of math, among other topics. Today’s computer science owes him a debt for his studies of Boolean algebra, the branch of math that expresses its variables as zeros and ones—and is today used for computer circuitry among other applications. Peirce shares with Saussure a lack of publication, although he lived much longer than did Saussure: at his death, Peirce had about 12,000 pages of published material, but an astonishing quantity of unpublished work, amounting to around 80– 90,000 pages. Two early collected volumes are still useful, but more significant is a Peirce publication project, The Writing of C. S. Peirce, which will fill 30 volumes—eight have been produced so far.

Looking at Meaning: Semiotics  197

A second Saussurean point is the difference between linguistic structures— the French term he used is langue—and actual speech—what he termed parole. This denotes the contrast between abstraction, the ideas that shape language, and the practice of language, what people say. The discipline of structural linguistics is based on Saussurean concepts, as is a theoretical approach in cultural anthropology called structural anthropology. Structural anthropology is substantially different from the structuration theory we discussed previously. The principle proponent of structural anthropology is the French cultural anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss. He believed that human minds possess deep structures that are similar across contemporary cultures, and have been similar through time. In short, there are universals that shape human thinking. These universals are expressed as binary oppositions: nature and culture; the raw and the cooked (the title of one of Levi-Strauss’s books); light and dark; happy and sad…. The list is endless. This is in fact, one of the problems of structural analysis: identifying what binaries are the significant ones—and how does a researcher recognize binaries in the first place? Not only have structural approaches been used in linguistics and anthropology, they appear in other fields as well. Literature provides an example. Some literary theorists have postulated that there are deep themes in literary works, and that one of the most important things we can examine in literature is the structure of texts. The search for those deep structures that shape and underlie a variety of surface expressions is thus the goal of anthropologists, linguists, and literary theorists. The deep structure, the langue, can only be seen by studying its surface expressions, the parole, but the latter are simply imperfect expressions of the underlying fundamental structure. While structuralist approaches were current for several decades, the assumptions underlying this way of looking at the world have been criticized heavily. Saying that universal structures exist is a generalization. It is also totalizing, that is, it subsumes a wide variety of phenomena under a single theoretical umbrella, a “grand narrative.” Totalizing or generalizing ideas stand in contrast to the smaller-sale, localized processes and analyses that postprocessualists favor. In addition, much structural analysis seems to be floating in time, that is, it is ahistorical. In Levi-Strauss’s defense, his work did lead anthropology in an interesting direction: towards relating actual ­behavior and cognition. This leads in turn to looking at relationships. In addition, structural work helped anthropologists see that cognitive categories are significant for shaping relationships and perceptions, in short, general ­culture, even if the bases are not binaries. Archaeologists have also been interested in applying structural principles. One famous study involves Paleolithic cave art. The French Paleolithic archaeologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan examined cave paintings and postulated binary relationships between pairs of animals and the then-accepted binary of male–female. As an example of how difficult it can be to determine what perceived binaries might mean, another French archaeologist also looked for binaries, found similar pairings of animals, but decided that the associations

198  Looking at Meaning: Semiotics Box 9.2  Ferdinand de Saussure In 1916, the book Cours de linguistique génénerale (Course in General Linguistics) was published; it was to become one of the most influential books on linguistics in the twentieth century, and is still important today. The Swiss linguist de Saussure lived just 55 years (1857–1913), and Cours was actually created by two colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, from Saussure’s notes and lecture notes taken by his students during 3 academic years when Saussure taught a general linguistics course. Most of his other work was either unfinished or unpublished at his death, but has been edited, often translated, and published since. The Saussure family included many natural scientists prominent in the 1800s, and at first Ferdinand intended to follow in their footsteps. Instead, he became intrigued by language, and at the early age of 21 published to great acclaim a paper on Indo-European languages (the language family that includes most of the languages spoken in Europe). His doctoral work was also on Indo-European languages, and he taught Sanskrit throughout his short academic career. Saussure’s Sanskrit studies are important to this day. Cours, however, had greater impact, and this has led to Saussure’s recognition as the founder of semiology. The discipline of semiology, broadly speaking, is the study of signs, and it is not exclusively linguistic. The linguistic aspect is what has most influenced archaeology, as well as anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Saussure proposed that signs had two parts, the signifier and the signified. Their connection is arbitrary, and the links between the two vary from language to language. An example is the difference between words used for Ovis aries. In English, this means “sheep,” but in French the word is mouton, which refers to the physical animal as well as the meat from it. On the other hand, the English word sheep refers to just the animal, while the meat is mutton. This shows the arbitrariness of language, and its social construction: meaning is created when signs are made. Words to express something change, and the same word changes meaning through time. Saussure was interested in both the synchronic dimension of languages—how they were structured at any point in time—and the diachronic aspects—how they change through time. You will see reflections of this in Chapter 9, in archaeological discussions of synchronic and diachronic considerations of material culture. Another fundamental Saussurean dichotomy is between langue (language, its linguistic structure minus speech) and parole (speech,

Looking at Meaning: Semiotics  199 what people utter). Language structures enable speech communities to communicate. Use of words differs from individual to individual, and is thus variable. No one person can change language, but if innovations are accepted by numbers of people, the language changes. This is similar to how structure changes in Gidden’s formulation: small changes can result in major structural shifts if enough people accept the new variation. As mentioned above, Saussure’s influence is widespread, particularly in the form of structural anthropology which is most closely associated with Claude Levi-Strauss. While structuralism as derived from Saussure is no longer much applied in modern anthropology, its historical importance endures, as does Saussure’s work itself.

between animal pairs and the human male–female binary was exactly the opposite of what Leroi-Gourhan proposed. Looking at the archaeology of more recent times, James Deetz applied structuralist concepts to colonial American material culture, from house forms though grave stones and crockery. The binaries he extracted, such as the one contrasting artificial and natural, allowed him to discuss compellingly changes in early American culture during the eighteenth century. Ian Hodder (Box 11.2) was also interested in structural approaches in the 1980s, although he has moved away from them in later work. Nonetheless, his structural work has been highly influential for a generation of scholars. Taking inspiration from Saussure, he proposed that the past was a text, and therefore could be “read.” The aspects of text that Hodder emphasized are texts’ concrete nature, the fact that they are designed to accomplish some objective, and that they are situated in specific contexts. Hodder also realized that, in distinction to words which have a limited range of meanings, material culture has many potential meanings—it is polysemous. This makes the study of the archaeological record—a term that Hodder notes implies a textual quality for what we study—very challenging. From the notion that past times could be read as texts, Hodder moved onto the idea of “con-text” within a text. For Hodder, we get at contexts by looking for binary opposition in investigative realms such as time, space, deposition, and types—e.g., of artifacts or features. Meanings can then be abstracted from the totality of similarities and differences, contrasts, and associations amongst the items being examined. Patterns are essential for this sort of study, and it is a data-heavy approach. Archaeologists have always been interested in material patterns and we tend to be fine with having lots of data. What Hodder wanted us to do, in part, is to look at both data and theory, tacking back and forth between the two— which is exactly what we have been emphasizing in this book. Although once

200  Looking at Meaning: Semiotics

he has adopted a body of theory or an interpretive stance, Hodder pursues it avidly, he also has pointed out that archaeology benefits from having a multiplicity of theories: no single theory or body of theories can answer all the questions archaeologists might develop.

Peircean Semiotics Let’s turn now to Charles Sanders Peirce, the other founder of semiotics. Increasingly, Peirce is the inspiration for semiotic approaches in archaeology. The general aspects of Peirce’s work that interest archaeologists are: • • • • • •

a broad definition of signs; any given sign is polysemous, that is it has a variety of possible meanings; a stress on relationships; an appreciation of temporality; the perception that all knowledge is situated; attention to pragmatism and engagement in the world.

In contrast to Saussure’s binary view of signs, the signifier and the signified, Pierce proposes a three-part division (Figure 9.1). First is the sign itself, a broadly construed category. The sign represents an object, not necessarily a material object: ideas and other immaterial things are objects as well. A sign is in a well-defined relationship with its object. The object is what the sign indicates or represents.

Figure 9.1  The three components of C.S. Peirce’s triadic concept of the sign are shown here, with alternate designations for each part. Since each interpretant is itself a sign, the production of signs is ongoing and, therefore, has a temporal component that we have tried to illustrate. Modified from a commonly-used illustration of Peirce’s triadic concept.

Looking at Meaning: Semiotics  201

The third component is the interpretant, defined as the result of a process of interpretation. It is the effect of the sign on the mind of the person who comprehends the sign, as in reading something or looking at, for example, a stick figure indicating a restroom. Commonly, paraphrasing Peirce, people say that a sign stands for an object, to an agent, the interpreter. One of the advantages of this approach is the recognition that new signs are continuously generated by the interaction of object, sign, and interpretant. Each interpretant is in essence a new sign, or generates new signs. This ongoing generation of signs allows for a temporal component: each sign looks back to its predecessors, and forward to other signs. Systems of signs are also open systems, always in the process of becoming. Another advantage is that signs are part of the real world of action and activity. Moving to meaning, for Peirce it is not inherent in a sign. Meaning is learned from the context of the sign’s use. Patterns in contexts are significant here—and we can see the appeal of this approach to archaeology more clearly because of this emphasis on context, along with the temporal dimension of signs. Looking back to Saussure, we can recall that for him the relationship between the sign and its signifier is arbitrary. To Peirce, the relationships are not necessarily arbitrary, and can be looked at in terms of three aspects: a sign can be an index of something (indexicality), an icon in and of itself (iconicity), or it can be a symbol (symbolism). An index (indexical sign) points to something; we can think of it as focusing attention. An index signals the existence of something, and indicates a relationship as well—continuity, connection, cause and effect, among others. An example of an index is the proper name of a person or place. The name Francis Bacon is an index for the Elizabethan scientist, and, interestingly, for a little-known nineteenth-century British archaeologist, and a twentieth-century British artist. A material example could be footprints left in the damp soil of a garden. If we see the mark of a shoe, the print is an index of a person; if a paw, of an animal. If we know what the paw prints of specific animals look like, then the print is an index of a specific kind of animal, say the neighboring cat that thinks a freshly turned bed is a cat pan. When a sign is an icon, there is a shared quality between the sign and what it signals: the sign resembles or imitates or is an analogy of the object. This is true even if the entity being signaled doesn’t exist. Examples of iconic signs are the figures used to indicate restrooms, or a road sign with a wiggly line—an icon for a patch of road that has dangerous curves. In Peirce’s three-part characterization of signs, there are also symbols. “Symbol” is a kind of residual category: a sign that is neither iconic nor an index. There is a conventional link, some sort of a rule or a developed habit, between a symbol and its assigned meaning. The link is arbitrary, just as it

202  Looking at Meaning: Semiotics

is in Saussure’s signifier–signified binary. An implication of this view is that symbols have to be learned since there is no necessary connection between a symbol and what it refers to. A punctuation mark would be an example of this. What we see as an exclamation point has a conventional meaning of surprise or excitement; we learn this. For Peirce, the three types of signs are not mutually exclusive; that is to say, a specific sign can be two or three of the kinds at the same time. In any use however, one is likely to predominate. How do we know what kind of sign we are interacting with? The kind of sign is based on its context. Since signs don’t stand alone, once again we are directed to the idea of relationships, and with relationships come patterns. Patterns result from a variety of processes. We have material habits, daily behaviors, actions to which we give no conscious thought—all of which are similar to the idea of habitus that we encountered previously in Bourdieu’s version of practice theory. Patterns are produced by way of repeated actions whether conscious or not. A church service or a soccer game may happen just once a week, but will still produce predictable patterns. So do even less common events. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, or the Philadelphia ­Mummers’ ­parade, happen just once a year but each is still a highly structured activity that leaves multiple material patterns. Peirce’s ideas that are important for archaeology are the following. He has a theory that relates behavior, objects, and meaning. His ideas include the temporal aspects that are so important to archaeology. The three-part division of signs encourages us to think of signs in multiple ways, and to realize that signs can, and usually do, have more than one meaning at any given time. In addition, meanings aren’t necessarily fixed, but rather are in a state of flux. Peircean semiotics also direct us towards the idea that knowledge and social relationships, for example, are socially constructed or situated. This insight is not his alone, but it is a crucial one for the social sciences, and archaeology is a social science as well as a humanity and a natural field science.

An Archaeological Example Many articles published in the last 20 years refer to Peirce and his version of semiotics, so there is a rich body of material we can look at for examples of archaeological applications of his ideas. Here we want to highlight just one: Scott R. Hutson, Aline Magnoni, and Travis W. Stanton’s 2012 article entitled “‘All That Is Solid…’: Sacbes, Settlement, and Semiotics at Tzacauil, Yucatan” (see this chapter’s Suggested Readings for the full citation). The site of Tzacauil (pronounced T-zah-ka-wil) is in central Yucatan, 3.2 km east of a larger site called Yaxunah (Ya-shu-nah). Each site contains a large platform supporting smaller buildings; these are called in local archaeological

Looking at Meaning: Semiotics  203

parlance acropolises. Tzacauil has little construction beyond the acropolis, just 17 structures, but Yaxuna’s acropolis is surrounded by a multitude of other, smaller stone-faced platforms. Yaxunah has a long sequence of occupation, running from the Middle Preclassic (the Preclassic is also known as the Formative), starting as early as 1000 BCE, and ending in the Late Postclassic CE 1000–1697 in this area). Tzacauil, on the other hand, seems to have a more limited occupation, largely being in use during the Late Preclassic (250 BCE– CE 250 here). The acropolises at the two sites have substantial similarities: they both follow a Preclassic pattern common in the Maya area. In the course of conducting the regional survey the authors discovered something unexpected: a raised causeway known as a sacbe starting at Tzacauil and running west towards Yaxunah. Although at the time the article was written there were no radiocarbon dates clearly linking the sacbe and the Tzacauil acropolis, the causeway does start at the acropolis and the authors reasonably assume that the two are contemporaneous. The sacbe does not stretch all the way to Yaxunah; in fact the closer it gets to Yaxunah, the less complete it is, and it stops at about 1.7 km short of Tzacauil. The last few hundred meters suggest that either the people constructing it gathered some resources between 1.5 and 1.7 km from the Tzacauil acropolis but never completed the construction, or that they largely completed building to the 1.7 km mark, but the construction was later robbed of stone. Looking at the short distance between Yaxunah and Tzacauil, and considering it in light of models about hierarchies and the relations between central and subsidiary sites, there seems to be no reason that Tzacauil existed in the form it did; the acropolis in particular stands out as an unusually large and complex construction. If the central elites at Yaxunah wanted to control people, their activities, and what they produced in the area east of their site they could have walked the relatively short distance to do so. There may have been an impetus for founding the site other than as a means of exercising control through agents of Yaxunah elites operating out of the Tzacauil acropolis. It is possible, the authors suggest, that Tzacauil residents were exerting their agency to materialize their own power, perhaps in resistance to Yaxunah’s rulers. Yet the sacbe suggests that Tzacauil residents also wished to be included in the Yaxunah sphere of influence. Sacbes were used for ritual processions in the Maya area; some researchers have suggested that movement towards a site, then return to the origin point, represented the circulation of vital lifeforce. This idea is based in part on ethnographic analogy with the ritual cycles carried out by some contemporary Maya populations. If this was the case, then the sacbe linking Yaxunah and Tzacauil would have bound occupants of these sites within the vital flows of energy that were essential to their communal survival.

204  Looking at Meaning: Semiotics

Whatever purposes the Tzacauil sacbe served, the construction itself was a novelty. Peircean semiotics, the authors believe, helps us understand the nature of the sacbe and enables us to see the construction in a temporal context beyond its period of construction and use. The sacbe, in terms of Peirce’s three-part structure of signs, is the sign itself. The object of the sacbe is political connection between the elites in the two sites. The interpretants are Tzacauil leaders. From this relationship new signs were generated. The development of a new sign takes people into the future, but the transformation of a sign to a new context can be risky. Whether or not the new sign is accepted depends on the social context of that novel sign. In this example, short causeways which had occurred previously within lowland Maya sites were transformed into a new kind of sacbe: longer ones connecting settlements. The incomplete nature of the Tzacauil causeway, and the small amount of labor and material resources devoted to it compared to what was invested in the acropolis, may indicate that the attempt to materialize power relations in the form of a sacbe was not fully accepted by a significant segment of the Tzacauil or Yaxunah populations. Nonetheless a new sign—more than one new sign—came into existence as a result of these efforts and this sign was accepted in succeeding times. This example uses the triadic relationship among sign, object, and interpretant proposed by Peirce, the ideas of a sign looking to the past and to the future, the social context needed for any sign generated from an older sign to be accepted, and stresses the human-to-human relationships, as well as relationships between humans and things, in understanding the past significance of the materials we study. It also points to how archaeologists can use Peirce’s ideas to discuss change through time. As we read this Peircean approach, the sacbe while it was being built may have been an index, pointing to the movement of processions that would travel on it, to the labor needed to build it, and to the power through which that labor was mobilized. The interpretant in these relations, however, failed. For whatever reason, the new sign that was being created by moving earth and stone did not resonate with a large part of the ancient population. The indexical connections the sacbe’s creation aimed to forge did not make sense within the existing cultural context, or at least not enough sense to bother finishing the project. The sacbe did not vanish from the landscape, however. It was still there for all to see and its meanings undoubtedly shifted over time. It is possible that by some later point the raised walkway no longer pointed indexically to labor, power and movement. Instead it might have been iconic of ancestors, of their past actions that continued to shape the world in which their descendants lived. Whether this was the case or not, Peircean approaches move us past a search for enduring binaries and towards an examination of the multiple and dynamic components of meanings that pertain in the present and were prevalent in the past. In adopting this perspective, Hutson, Magnoni, and

Looking at Meaning: Semiotics  205

Stanton offer us a way to rethink the multiple components of meaning, how they might change over time, and why those attempts to create new meanings sometimes fail.

Naco and Semiotics One class of artifacts found at La Sierra that has preoccupied us for a while is the cut block. They were introduced into construction in the Late Classic, and by the end of the Terminal Classic had fallen out of use. These pieces of shaped masonry were largely restricted at first to large platforms in the site core. During the subsequent Terminal Classic these cut stones, mostly made of tuff, were moved from their original positions. Together with unmodified river cobbles, they were employed as platform facings and put to use in a number of ways: for corner stones, as steps, and on the inner thresholds of residences, among others. Given our predilections we tended to see the change of use in terms of power relations. The large central buildings of the Late Classic site core are associated with elite individuals, while reuse in construction away from the center was accomplished by the artisans who lived in the residential clusters north and south of that core. To us, this reuse signified a change in power ­relations. Furthermore, we thought reuse formed and maintained memories of the elite and their downfall. Reusing the blocks that had graced monumental platforms that expressed elite preeminence was a way of physically expressing and recalling the overthrow of the Late Classic dynasts. Working with the semiotic approaches you’ve just read about, we have begun to think in different ways about blocks and their meanings. Peircean semiotics makes the most sense to us, and seems to make sense of the blocks as well. In the classic Peircean example of a rooster weathervane, the depiction is iconic of the bird itself. The direction the weathervane points is an index of the wind direction. The symbolic content is less clear, at least to us. Lele (see this chapter’s Suggested Reading) mentions that the symbolic content depends on the vane’s characteristics: a painted wooden vane signals a rustic environment such as a country barn, while a finely made metal vane would be appropriate for some place more formal, such as a courthouse. Using the three kinds of signs, index, icon, and symbol, we developed some thoughts about the ballcourt at La Sierra and what it might have meant to a variety of the site’s residents. First however, we need to talk about ballcourts in nearby Classic Maya sites because these seem to be the inspiration for the La Sierra court. The nearest Classic Maya sites are Copán right at the edge of western ­Honduras, and Quirigua, Guatemala, lying over the mountains that border the Naco valley on the west. At both sites, the courts are set in the spaces made by two buildings that run parallel to each other. One end of these

206  Looking at Meaning: Semiotics

courts is defined by a building running perpendicular to the court’s main axis. The terraces on this building could have served as bleachers for observers. The parallel structures delimiting the sides of the court itself have sloping zones connecting the basal walls and a vertical wall that rises above the sloping zone. The orientations of the courts, however, differ: the Copán court runs north–south, and Quirigua’s is aligned east–west. The La Sierra court follows aspects of both Maya sites. The court itself is oriented roughly north–south. Instead of a platform closing one end (the south in this case) of the court, that side is sealed by a natural hill that was terraced to provide viewing spaces similar to those at the Maya sites. The construction of the court’s buildings incorporated a vertical basal wall above which was a sloping zone that, in turn, ended in a vertical stone ascent to the summit. In Maya courts the summits often supported superstructures. If these summit constructions ever existed at La Sierra they were not preserved. In addition, the circular stones that were usually placed along the center lines of lowland Maya courts were not found in place at La Sierra. Construction of the courts required knowledge of both forms and building techniques. The La Sierra courts followed local techniques except for the cut block sheathing—this was an innovation in valley construction. In fact, the form and mode of raising the court were unprecedented in the Naco valley as far as we know at present. The consensus amongst students of the Classic period Mayans is that the ballcourts represented a conflict with the denizens of the underworld, gods of death and disease. As such, winning a game probably meant a triumph over death. In Mayan literature and some iconography, the original players were two brothers known as the Hero Twins. They descended to the underworld to play ball with the lower realm’s gods, and ultimately won the games, although eventually both died after trials set by the gods. They came back to life, tricked the gods into being killed, and then the twins returned to the world, but kept on climbing into the sky, where one became the moon and the other the sun. The ballgame, at least during the Classic period in the Maya lowlands, was less a sport than a powerful enactment of the primal and enduring relations among people and gods, life, birth, and death. We do not know whether or not the La Sierra elites were aware of the Mayan meaning (and there are more associations than those with just the Hero Twins) of a ballcourt, although they apparently were aware of court forms and placement. Neither do we know about any games that might have been played at La Sierra; certainly, no rubber balls were recovered. Perhaps La Sierra folks knew that the stones along the center line—typically round— were portals to the underworld; we suspect they did, given where such stones wound up. Let us turn to Peirce and his three sorts of signs; indexes, icons, and symbols. For those with knowledge of lowland Mayan courts, these constructions were an index of the ballgame, among other thigs, such as a set of

Looking at Meaning: Semiotics  207

relationships between gods and humans. Courts could be icons of the universe: the upper world, the underworld, and our world in between the two. In fact, the courts were places where relations among the upper and lower worlds were mediated by ritual contests played in the courts. In symbolic terms, courts represented the Hero Twins, their journey, and eventual triumph over death. Signs can be symbols, indexes, and icons at the same time, depending on the interpretant and her social and cultural position (leaving aside the possibility of non-human interpretants). We propose, however, that the elites who commissioned and oversaw the ballcourt construction in the Naco Valley had at least some understanding of lowland Mayan ideas about courts, and hoped to transfer these ideas into their local contexts. What of the people who built the courts? That group included stone cutters, those who transported stone from its quarry in the southwest of the ­valley, those who gathered river cobbles and moved them to the alley’s position, people who built the structure cores and likely put in place the cut blocks, people who fed and otherwise cared for the construction workers, and others. Can we get a sense of what they saw in the court? All signs are polysemous, that is, they have multiple meanings. We propose, however, that the actual builders and those who helped them did not know as much about lowland Maya elite culture as did their rulers, and so their ideas differed. For them, the indexical meaning may have been power relations, work arrangements, labor invested by them (and here you see our own tendency to see the world in terms of power), and other differences between them and the elites. The courts could have been icons of a new way of doing and perhaps being. The symbolic content could have been rulership— and there is other evidence that the elites were trying to perform a version of individual rulership in other media, such as sculpture. Perhaps actual games entered into their perceptions, although we have no evidence that the courts were used for games or, if so, how those contests were structured. On the other hand, deposits at the south end of the court did contain large numbers of incense burners, as well as food-serving vessels. These materials likely are parts of the debris resulting from use of the courts. Their content points to the performance of religious rites in association with feasting. Perhaps these activities added a locally significant layer of meaning to the courts, one that involved communally enacting feelings of solidarity on a large scale. Like the Yaxunah-Tzacauil sacbe, whatever the La Sierra ballcourt meant to the rulers who commissioned it, those meanings failed to take hold among their subordinates. Elites and commoners (simplifying the composition of both groups) likely had widely differing views of the courts, their construction, and what they meant as indices, icons, and symbols in relation to shared and individual lifeworlds. That the tensions among these views were not fully resolved through feasting and religious rites in the court is suggested by how the majority deconstructed, literally, the court, reusing blocks in other places and in a variety of ways; above we mentioned steps and corner stones.

208  Looking at Meaning: Semiotics

The round stones are found in domestic contexts as well, and it appears that the round centerline markers continued to be significant as portals: they are found in the interiors of rooms, just past the threshold. We cannot say exactly in what ways the La Sierra ballcourt was an index, icon, or symbol to those who used it. Trying to tease out these different aspects of meaning and to think about how they may change, however, is useful to us, and we will continue to think about how Peirce’s ideas might help us understand the Naco Valley’s past.

10 Phenomenology and Experience

Another approach to understanding had become important to archaeology in the last few decades: phenomenology. Phenomenology is about how real human subjects experience the world. Peoples’ perceptions of the world, including not just other humans but things as well, are bodily perceptions, through our physical senses. Another term for this idea about perception is embodiment. Phenomenological approaches nest with the humanistic branch of postmodernism. Some of phenomenology’s basic ideas include: • • • • •

a return to human experience; rejection of the notion that the world we see is not real—what we see isn’t some mental representation, a kind of virtual reality in our minds; the importance of trying to grasp phenomena from within, that is, to have an emic understanding of them; after understanding, it may be possible to move towards an explanation of what we’re experiencing; and detailed descriptions are fundamental—we need to describe situations as they appear to our consciousness as mediated by our physical senses.

Three philosophers are credited with being the founders of phenomenology: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Archaeologists have been inspired by all three, and what follows are brief considerations of each man’s work along with an archaeological example of how the concepts phenomenology drawn from these thinkers have been applied in an archaeological case.

Edmund Husserl Husserl’s main interest was studying the structure of consciousness (see Box 10.1). For him, all consciousness is consciousness of something or about something; that “something” is a kind of object. Objects can be material, non-material, or even totally imaginary—a unicorn is an object even though it does not actually exist. Consciousness, then, is directed in the same way

210  Phenomenology and Experience Box 10.1  Edmond Husserl Born in Prossnitz, Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian E ­ mpire (now Prostĕjov, Moravia, Czech Republic), Edmond Husserl is considered the founder of phenomenology, although he did not coin the term. In essence, he was concerned with the constitution of the world, the relationship between being and reason, and subjectivity and the constitution of objectivity. In his youth he studied mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, writing a doctoral thesis in 1883 on an aspect of the philosophy of mathematics. In addition, he obtained a further credential which allowed him to teach in German universities; his topic was again mathematics, published as Concept of Numbers in 1887. He did post-graduate studies with the Viennese philosopher Franz Brentano, who had a profound influence on his thinking. Between 1900 and 1901 he worked on what was to be a projected two volumes, Logical Investigations, his initial foray into phenomenology; the second volume was never published. This was the beginning of a pattern: Husserl reworked his ideas many times, and often abandoned a book just before it was due to be published because his thinking had changed between writing and printing. The combination of his ever-changing ideas, the abandoned projects, and the complexity of his writing has left followers with a complex tangle. Add to this his approximately 45,000 pages of unpublished material and the task of understanding his views of phenomenology becomes even more daunting. Husserl’s career spanned three German universities in Halle, Göttingen, and Freiberg. Later philosophers see his output as divided into three periods which correspond to the time spent in each place. Some believe that the trajectory of his ideas is best understood by tracing them from a beginning at Halle to an end at Freiberg; others take the opposite position, starting at the end and working back. Whatever the path we take through his work, the ideas most interesting to archeologists have to do with experience and human–thing relations. Husserl’s father was a prominent clothing merchant, which allowed Edmond to study at various private schools. The family was one of the 328 Jewish families allowed by law in Prossnitz; the other minority, people of German descent, had no population size restrictions. Early on, Husserl converted to Christianity, as did his wife, but this did not free them and their children from persecution under the National Socialists (i.e., Nazis): he was stripped of his German citizenship in 1935, forbidden to either teach or publish. Nonetheless, his work has been very influential in shaping phenomenological approaches.

Phenomenology and Experience  211

the verb in a sentence points to the object of its sentence. Husserl called this direction intentionality, but his sense of “intention” is not the one we usually attribute to the word: it is not about planning or thinking about doing something. Instead, intentionality—as a philosophical term—relates to states of mind and is, in essence, awareness. When we see a car, our perception is of that specific thing, a car; when we do math, we are thinking about numbers and the relationships among them, such as adding the numbers 2 and 2, to arrive at the total 4. Husserl notes many different kinds of intentionality, among them perception, emotions, memory, and retention of something learned. In phenomenology, the reality which surrounds us can be grasped through attention to experience, in distinction to the representationalist view that reality cannot be understood directly. In representationalist thought, reality can be approached by means other than experiences, however, such as scientific study. How can we study experiential reality? Wouldn’t each of our lived experiences get in the way of understanding situations other than our own? Husserl’s answer to the problem of grasping objects and others’ experiences of them is bracketing. This term means putting aside our natural assumptions, much as in anthropology we try to put to the side our ideas about how the world works in order to get at how other people understand the world. Also similar to the position in anthropology is Husserl’s stress on not prejudging what we see. By bracketing and not prejudging, we will be able to get at the essential characteristics of an object. Behind intentionality is, however, something that is shared: a lifeworld. This means that we have pre-given backgrounds that provide members of a social group a way to shape the world into intelligible objects. The concept of lifeworld is a highly refined version of what we called worldview in earlier chapters. Although a lifeworld is shared with others, within it each of us has a subjective, unique experience: we share in the commonalities of a lifeworld differentially. In order to get along in groups we therefore need to deal with everyone else’s subjectivities. The term for this is intersubjectivity. This concept strikes a balance between isolated individual experience and wholly shared, universal experiences. Intersubjectivity is related to empathy with others. A final aspect of Husserl’s thought that is important for archaeology is temporality. Husserl wrote about the internal, subjective experience of time that we have—part of individual consciousness. He also addressed questions about the perception of time beyond the individual. Time, then, is intersubjective: a specific interpretation of the passage of time is both unique and shaped by the ideas of the community in which we live. Westerners, for example, tend to think of time in a linear fashion, so our personal stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. In other cultures, time may be perceived as cyclical: what happened before will happen again, perhaps in a slightly altered form but still recognizable as part of a cycle. This conception of time can be seen in the calendar system of pre-Columbian Maya people.

212  Phenomenology and Experience

Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger is the second person regarded as a founder of phenomenology (see Box 10.2). His work was inspired by Husserl—he, too, was opposed to positivism, extending this position to suspicion about the dominance of technology in modern times—but his position differs from his predecessor’s in a number of respects. Box 10.2  Martin Heidegger This philosopher, second founder of phenomenology, lived from 1889– 1976. His was not a prominent or rich family, but nonetheless he received a good education, in part because of a scholarship from the Catholic church. In 1903 he began studying for the priesthood at a Jesuit seminary, but left due to poor health. Enrolling at Freiburg, and still supported by the church, Heidegger studied theology from 1909–1911, but switched to courses in philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences; he began teaching there in 1913. Edmond Husserl was then employed at Freiburg, and Heidegger became his assistant in 1915. His doctoral thesis concerned psychologism, which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “The view or doctrine that a theory of psychology or ideas forms the basis of an account of metaphysics, epistemology, or meaning.” For his license to teach, he wrote on the fourteenth century theologian and philosopher Duns Scotus. Between 1923 and 1926 Heidegger taught in Marburg, leaving that university for Freiburg, where he replaced Husserl, who had retired. From 1933–1934 he was the ­Rector at Freiburg, elected by the faculty, but returned to the faculty after that year. Heidegger’s work as it pertains to archaeology is covered in the chapter. Briefly, he rejected the modernist tradition, in particular positivism, instead turning to what we would call postmodernism: his primary concerns were questions of Being and the meaning of Being (see Dasein in the chapter and glossary). Although initially influenced by Husserl—and crediting him with that influence even when Heidegger himself departed substantially from Husserl’s projects—his thought underwent substantial change in the 1930s: he turned to language as a way to investigate Being. Additionally, he wrote about others’ historical works, and paid much attention to the arts, for example, poetry and architecture. Heidegger’s thought can be related not just to phenomenology in archaeology but also to new materialism. He discussed how people use things based on what they want to accomplish without much deliberate concern for the object itself. A hammer is picked up and used

Phenomenology and Experience  213 to put a nail into wood—it is ready-to-hand, part of a world of work. When people start to think about things as entities in and of themselves, they take on a more theoretical view called present-to-hand: things are just there as themselves. However we perceive an object, we are in a relationship with it. Heidegger presents us with the question of how we can, or would want to, separate an individual’s work from that person’s personal attributes and choices. Heidegger was revered as a teacher by many students, even though he was a difficult writer, and person, often bombastic and irritating. Worse, he joined and supported the ­National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP, Nazis for short): while he was Freiburg’s rector in 1933–1934 he enforced a decree removing non-“German” professors from their positions, an act that did not affect Husserl as an academic, but did damage him as a person. Later Heidegger’s influence in the Nazi party waned, and he was prohibited from publishing and attending conferences, ending the war as a trench-­ digger on the frontlines. Despite knowledge of the Holocaust, he never denounced it. Yet Heidegger is one of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century, influencing a very wide range of thought: phenomenology and other philosophic schools; existentialism; psychology; theology; and political science.

To Heidegger, phenomenology is a method for the study of experience. Existence is primary, and consciousness is secondary to it. Our states of mind are the effect of our existence—and like Husserl, Heidegger says that when we think, we think about something: our everyday life. The fundamental concept, then is “being-in-the-world,” what he calls Dasein. A being is a thing, a category that includes people. Beings are interrelated, particularly human beings. Yet each of us has a lifeworld, a “world” of our own in which we live. Each object in our world stands out and has a meaning that is ours alone. Our worlds however, are related to the worlds of others, and we ourselves are related to others. How, then, are we related—how do we grasp another’s being? For Heidegger, relatedness comes about through empathy. We take our experience and apply it to other subjects. In turn, each of us is a subject of others’ experiences. The result is intersubjectivity, a concept we have already encountered in Husserl’s work; and intersubjectivity is relational—it does not exist without connection to others. So as a result, a lifeworld is for humans both personal and intersubjective. In this version of phenomenology, space is also significant. Heidegger’s conception of space is not necessarily a literal, physical space. Instead, it is a functional space made up of our interconnections.

214  Phenomenology and Experience

This functional space brings us to the idea of embodiment, and Heidegger’s idea of dwelling in the world, that is, being in a world that we perceive through the experience of our bodies. Intersubjectivity creates collective experiences, and Heidegger thought that these collective experiences have an important time dimension. It is the temporal aspect of collective experience that provides meaning. As members of groups, we come to see that the past, the present, and the future all exist, standing out from the totality of diachronic collective experience. Our being is relational, constituted in part by our own experience, and in part by intersubjective experiences. The world of Dasein is not without limits: it is historically constituted through what came before, and limited or constrained by culture. This is similar to the concepts we covered earlier under, for example, structuration and practice theories, and feminism. As with those previously-discussed ideas, Heideggerian phenomenology points out that even nature is a construct; viewing this in light of other theories, resources are constructed, and we are both constrained and enabled in our use of them. Heidegger would, we think, have talked about this in terms of how we dwell-in-the-world. Although Heidegger is considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, his legacy is tainted by his involvement with and apparent support of the National Socialist Party in Germany—that is, he was part of the Nazi movement. While some of his comments between the rise of the Nazis and the end of World War II have been construed as covert criticism of the regime, he never repudiated Nazism or apologized for his participation in that movement. Still, for archaeology, many of the issues Heidegger addressed are significant, and his way of looking at them has resonance for a number of researchers. These ideas include his thoughts about time and space, the interrelatedness of beings—including not just people but also what we can gloss as “things”— and the fact that we are not free, but rather constrained by time and the construction of our cultures. Finally, Heidegger’s emphasis on embodiment has been taken up by quite a few archaeologists as a way to get at the meanings ancient peoples might have attributed to their worlds through their bodily experience within those lifeworlds. Many of his ideas overlap with Husserl’s and when we look at how phenomenology has influenced archaeology, both thinkers are significant.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty It is our impression that of the three founders of phenomenology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see Box 10.3) is cited more often than his predecessors. Like them, Merleau-Ponty rejected empiricism, and also considered idealism—­ the supposition that reality is purely a mental construct—to be incorrect. He had no use for mind–body dualism, because such a binary ignores the connections between the body and what each body does. Empiricism,

Phenomenology and Experience  215

idealism, and binary opposition between the body and the mind ignore the contexts of life, the ambiguity and indeterminacy of existence, and the contingency of thought. These three considerations are of import to anthropology and archaeology, so it is easy to see how Merleau-Ponty would be important to us. Perception is at the core of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Perception is the foundation of how we engage with the world, and how we grasp it. Perception opens us to our “lifeworld,” a concept that we have seen already in phenomenological thought. We do not see our lifeworld as made up of parts. Instead, to us it is a whole, a view that is encapsulated by the German term ­gestalt. Sensing, or perceiving, the world is what brings meaning and value to it. Sense organs are parts of our bodies, so the concept of embodiment is ­crucial—­we are our bodies. The body conditions our experiences: a body is in the world the way a heart is in a body. Our perceptions of our bodies and our perceptions of things are essentially equal. Yet, what we see of the things in our lifeworld is limited by our own body’s place in that world, what ­Heidegger calls a body’s orientation. Orientation is conditioned by both space and time. Space is the physical contingency of our bodies, which are attuned to tasks. These can be actual tasks or possible tasks. Time conditions our orientation because the body is incarnate, that is, has a fleshly existence, in a specific time. A body’s time in the world is limited, but while it exists, every moment references the past and looks towards the future. Our existence, then, is contingent on our situatedness in time as well as space. Time itself has two dimensions. The first is absolute time, and the second is self-constituted time, what comes into existence because of the self ’s relationship to the world. Part of Merleau-Ponty’s concern with embodiment is learning with and through the body. He suggests that we have a present body, what we are in the moment, and a habitual body, one made up of past actions. Past actions are the ways we learn: through repetition, imitation, and instruction. Often we do not reflect on our bodily habits, just as Bourdieu suggests that we do not think about our habitus, although the two ideas are not entirely the same. So again, Merleau-Ponty posits that we have two bodies: the one constructed of habits, and the one in the present. Our lifeworld encompasses not just us and the things we perceive, but other people as well. We see these others as embodied beings who are also intersecting with the world. The world is shared, as Heidegger thought, but everyone’s situation is different—the differential participation highlighted in other schools of thought. Some of the aspects of life that condition our differential participation, in addition to space and time as we say above, are the characteristic of our own bodies. We have, for example, different motor skills, and our sensory capacities are usually in some ways dissimilar. Merleau-Ponty sums up his perspective with a discussion of domains, the term he uses for what we have just seen. There are the domains of individual

216  Phenomenology and Experience Box 10.3  Maurice Merleau-Ponty The third philosopher considered to be a founder of phenomenology is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, from France. His family took up residence in Paris during World War I after his father was killed in battle. His post-­ secondary studies took place at the École Normal Supérieure (1926– 1930), where he met Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Levi-Strauss; he would later become friends with Jean-Paul Sartre. His first prominent work, from 1938, is The Structure of Behavior in which he criticized then-current physiological psychology: for Merleau-Ponty, behavior could not be understood as a stimulus and response, but rather we must grasp all persons within their own worlds. He continued his studies in philosophy, and in 1945 defended two doctoral theses. Before the war he had done his mandatory military service, and during World War II he participated in the resistance, publishing a short-lived revue. During the war he also began to work with Sartre, though the two would part ways acrimoniously in 1955 after disagreements about the Korean War, and Merleau-­Ponty’s virtually complete disenchantment with Communism and the Soviet Union. Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual project was to achieve a radical description of human embodied experience. He rejected empiricism, as did Husserl and Heidegger, and believed that dualities such as subject–object and mind–body did not exist. Commentators have said that Merleau-Ponty was trying to combine phenomenology with Saussurean structural linguistics, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Gestalt psychology (an approach which views the mind and body together; “gestalt” itself refers to seeing a pattern or association of items as a whole that is more than the sum of its parts). The task seems impossible, but Merleau-­Ponty continued to work in this vein throughout his career. For archaeologists, and many others, Merleau-Ponty is most important for his insistence that all perception is embodied—we are our bodies in a literal sense. Our bodies lead us into the world in a pre-cognitive way, essentially placing us in the world as though we were always children, seeing then later analyzing. Each of us is in our own world in a unique and specific way due to our personal characteristics, yet we share in a social world constituted through our joint existence as part of nature. Other aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s thought are covered in the chapter itself. In conclusion we can say that Merleau-Ponty’s considerable contribution to existentialism is perhaps less significant for archaeology than is his phenomenological project of embodiment and perception. Some of the disciplines that utilize his ideas, beyond anthropology, archaeology, and sociology are cognitive sciences, ecology, and medical ethics.

Phenomenology and Experience  217

experience, our lived spaces—actual and possible—and personal attributes such as the senses, but also including age, sexuality and gender, and language. For archaeologists, there are many intriguing aspects of Merleau-­Ponty’s thought. First, experience is contingent, shaped by our situations in the world. All experience is embodied, situated in time and space; for this reason, we should not talk about the past without reference to specific experiences people might have had. Second, at the same time, we can see patterns that indicate shared experiences resulting from intersubjectivity. Third, life is ­fi nite, which may be why humans pay so much attention to death and the dead. Fourth, as Husserl suggested, to understand others we must bracket our own experience, observing without judgement and describing with as much detail as possible. Bracketing is fundamentally relativism as a research strategy: we each have truth as individuals and participants in our cultures, but this truth is not absolute. Other people and other groups also have what they see as truth, and we need to try to understand their truths from within, without prejudgment; in other words, we should take an emic perspective. When we acknowledge the importance of bracketing, or relativism as a research strategy, we can come closer to not imposing our own culture on the past, to not seeing the past as a reflection of the future—in short, we can try to see ways of existing that are different from our own, and that may not have clear analogies in contemporary times.

An Archaeological Example The use of the term “phenomenology” is increasing in archaeology, as has “semiotics.” One archaeologist, writing about the latter, commented that at times, referencing semiotics is more of a ritual incantation than an actual ­appeal to theory. Similar problems exist with phenomenology. Barrett and Ko (2009; see Suggested Readings), however, have written a detailed and cogent piece on Christopher Tilley’s use of phenomenology, which he says is inspired by Heidegger (see Suggested Reading for Tilley’s books and articles). Tilley’s work is an important focus of Barrett and Ko’s analysis because it constitutes an oft-referenced and foundational example of the application of phenomenology’s principles to archaeology. Tilley has been concerned with the placement of Neolithic monuments, such as burial mounds, since the early 1990s. He is interested in applying phenomenology to the placement of structures and how they appear in their landscapes. We risk simplifying Tilley’s complex arguments by saying he suggests that those who raised monuments such as Stonehenge did so to create coherent landscapes that evoked certain bodily sensations in those who experienced them. What those physical sensations were can be approximated by our encounters with the monuments now as we walk among and observe these massive stones. Tilley’s insistence that meaning results from the interaction between humans and materials is fully congruent with Heidegger’s version of phenomenology. The same can be said for his argument that the human body is the medium for these engagements.

218  Phenomenology and Experience

Where Tilley diverges from Heidegger, according to Barrett and Ko, is on the issue of intentionality. Going back to Heidegger’s original views, being is the foundation for our understanding of the world, which is created by each of us within specific historical states. As Barrett and Ko point out, according to Heidegger, being-in-the-world is not a state of conscious contemplation. We encounter objects as they are without preconceived theories about them. Our encounters are brief and fragmented, but through the accumulation of such encounters we grasp the completeness of objects, and from there we may come to contemplate—or in more technical terms—we theorize the encountered objects. In Barrett and Ko’s analysis, Tilley proposes that human action is intentional in the common sense: we determine that we will do something and then carry it out. His view of landscapes formed by monumental construction seems to be that the monuments were placed to create specific views, to enact a coherent vision by shaping the world to match that model. The builders’ original motivation was based on the consequences of their work. When we look at these landscapes now, we can see the intention of the ancients who constructed the monuments and experience what they intended us to feel. Monument construction in this view is an intellectual project—not an engagement with the world. Neolithic peoples, according to Heidegger’s version of phenomenology, did not engage with the world in order to characterize it. In Tilley’s presentations, however, they come with preexisting ideas about the world and the categories of which it is composed. They then shape more than experience that world. Tilley, therefore, is not following Heidegger’s ideas about being-in-theworld. A further, pragmatic criticism raised by these authors, and others, is that the analyses of ancient experiences Tilley provides are not reproducible: different archaeologists looking at the landscapes do not see the relationships between monuments, and monuments and natural features, that he postulates. In short, while Tilley claims to be following Heidegger, he is not; the claims about landscape are not substantiated by other observers; and the claim that modern people’s experiences of landscapes give insights into past experience is not tenable since perception is mediated by individuals’ specific characteristics as well as their historical placements. One of Barrett and Ko’s central questions is, how do we know? Can we truly understand what past folks saw and thought about what they saw, and can we replicate their experiences? The authors think not. That is not to say they reject phenomenology in archaeology, but they do advocate for closer readings of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and more careful application of their thought. In particular, they argue for specifying which philosopher’s version of phenomenology we use rather than acting as though there ­ erleau-Ponty is a generic phenomenology in which Husserl, Heidegger, and M can be blended.

Phenomenology and Experience  219

The Naco Valley For more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it, and I am the most obliged person in the world to you for telling me so. Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhome (The Bourgeois Gentleman, also known as The Middle-Class Aristocrat) This quote seems appropriate for discussing our work using phenomenology: we have been talking about aspects of the past in phenomenological terms, without realizing that we were—to us it was speculation based on our perceptions of sites. Look at the Map of La Sierra (Fig. 2.4). You will see that the structures in the North Cluster are very close together. There are other sites with similar plans: Site PVN 202, just south of where the Rio Chamelecón is pinched by hillsides, has over 120 structures packed into an area 110 m on a side (12,100 m 2, 130,243 ft2, or 3 acres). La Sierra’s North Cluster and Site PVN 202, are workshop and residential areas. We have walked through both areas many, many times imagining what it would be like to live so close to our neighbors—­and most likely family members. What would the smells be? Where did people relieve themselves? How smoky would it be when pottery was being fired? Were obsidian chips swept up promptly? At La Sierra there was also something of life among the ruins: not all the buildings were used simultaneously, so there may have been odors from decay and other sense impressions, such as visual ones of wattle and daub melting in the rain. It never occurred to us to systematically record our impressions, let alone write a scholarly article about them. To us, the impressions were ours. We do not believe that we can know what ancient Naqueños thought about structures less than a meter apart, or how sensitive they were to different odors. Given that people in crowded sites did have room to spread out by moving into seemingly open terrain, we speculate that their concepts of space were greatly different from our own, as were their ideas about trash disposal and air quality, too. This culturally-constructed view of space becomes clear to us every time we are in Honduras. Houses in the countryside are not built like ours, with separate rooms for different activities—some houses have only one room. The number of people in a house often reminds us of the crowding talked about in histories of tenements: 5, 8, 10 people in a space the size of our dining room in Gambier, Ohio. Another reminder of cultural construction was impressed on us when a friend from rural Honduras visited us in Ohio. We have 0.8 acres of land, and the house covers just a small portion of that. Our guest pointed out with glee that we could build separate houses for our son and daughter on our property, as well as outbuildings for chickens and rabbits. She was dismayed to learn that it would be illegal to build another house

220  Phenomenology and Experience

on our land, and getting a permit for even a free-standing garage would ­require a presentation at the town council. Indeed, just a block down the street the municipal designation changes, and on the other side of the line lots must be 5 acres or more. Our friend thought a plot that size could probably supply much of the corn needed for her family for a year, while our lot might be good for fruit trees and vegetables. Think about your own home and sound transmission, cooking smells, pet fur and dander, the location of washers and dryers. What other sensory experiences are there? How have these things affected your ideas about how the world should be? Were you conscious of how you were shaped, or did you just come to realize differences when you encountered other houses or apartments? How about having just a dorm room or a room in a shared apartment or house, instead of a space of your own, even if that space is shared with a sibling. The “how do we know” question is, of course, common to all research, but when it comes to perceptions or embodiment, we have to wonder how much we are we projecting our sensibilities onto the past. How can our modern take on, say, the vistas around ancient Avebury in the UK’s Salisbury Plain be tested and found to coincide—or not—with prehistoric apperceptions, particularly since the landscape changed in Neolithic times, and continues to change? Phenomenological approaches offer much to consider, once again along the lines of difference. We can try to infer what ancient people thought about a view or the placement of a burial mound, or the organization of space within such a mound. Most importantly, the different forms of phenomenology urge us to consider carefully our tendency to understand experience as a largely intellectual project in which our minds impose order on an unruly physical reality. There is much to be said for thinking about how the people we study might have come to understand themselves and others as they engaged with all facets of their surroundings using all their senses. Nonetheless, certainty in this endeavor eludes us.

11 New Materiality

Philosophy and New Materiality One of the first points to look at in this section is the difference between two kinds of philosophical inquiry. Some archaeologists have pointed out that theoretical schools prior to postprocessualism have been concerned with questions of epistemology. In philosophy, epistemology is the theory of knowledge: What do we know? How do we come to know? What is “knowledge” anyway? The school most often associated with epistemological inquiry is processualism, but researchers with feminist concerns have also looked at epistemological questions, as have Marxians. Ontology stands in contrast to that sort of concern. On the whole, ontology looks at questions of being: what is “being”? How can we look at and discuss being? Essentially being is reality: what is, what exists, and how that reality is structured. The structuring principle that is often stressed in discussions of ontology is relationships, not just between people—we have seen that concern earlier—but between people and things, and between things and other things. Within ontological analysis, there is a division between objectivism and subjectivism, also known as interpretivism. The objectivist approach claims that social reality exists outside of, that is, independently of, actors; knowledge here is in a sense relatively clear and observable. This kind of reality can be examined through what are thought to be objective testing, measurement, and recordings of observations—in short, through the methods of science. The objectivist stance on ontology shares much with modernism and can be seen to undergird processualism and most Marxian approaches. For archaeologists interested in ontological approaches, the subjectivist or interpretivist side of ontology is more inviting. In this account, knowledge is personal and subjective, and methods of knowing derived from the natural sciences are inappropriate; we have seen this rejection of empiricism before with respect to semiotics and phenomenology. Interpretivist work is based on the ideas that social phenomena and meaning are contingent and constructed, a point we have also encountered

222  New Materiality

earlier. What people see as social reality is built up from individual and group experiences, actions, and perceptions, among other human activities. Such a stance is very much in line with postmodernism and with the postprocessual perspectives that draw inspiration from that general movement. Turning from epistemology to ontology represents a major shift in how archaeologists work. The difference lies not just in looking at the past, but extends to looking at the conduct of archaeology itself, a point we will return to below.

The Word “Material” Archaeology is said to be one of the social science disciplines most concerned with materials. The term “material,” either as a free-standing word or as the root in terms like materialism, is a common one in our publications. But all uses of material and its derivatives are not the same. Three of them are particularly important here. Material culture studies have a long history in archaeology, but the expansion of such work has come after World War II, with the invention of a multitude of ways to look at artifacts, ecofacts, the components of the environment, and any other sort of object that interests archaeologists. The point of material culture study is to figure out the properties of items, describe these properties, and use the properties to get a sense of how the items functioned. The objects studied were considered a way to get at past peoples’ lives. In essence, this kind of analysis is associated with processual archaeology, but it has come to be fundamental to all ways of looking at the past. Notice that there is something missing here: relationships. While material culture is a way to get at behavior, the relationships that constitute behavior are not part of the analytical equation. Still, the study of material culture remains important, even modern material culture. There are archaeologists who do a kind of ethnoarchaeology within modern America. These “garbagolists” look at what we throw away to get at aspects of contemporary life that we may not be aware of. The best known of these sorts of studies is the Tucson Garbage Project, founded by William Rathje to look at contemporary waste disposal. This study has shed considerable insight on social organization and disposal. For example, it turns out that middle class Americans, in Tucson anyway, throw away more than members of either the upper or lower classes, and more of what is thrown away could actually have been used. Another rather distressing finding is that hot dogs can remain “viable” after a decade in a land fill. The project turned archaeologists working with the past toward considering a more nuanced consideration of disposal. The second way “material” is commonly used in archeology is as the basis for the word “materialism.” As you’ll recall from earlier sections, the processual approach was fundamentally materialist. Change in culture was

New Materiality  223

generally thought to come about in response to changing environmental conditions. In addition, human behavior was explained by demonstrating how it functioned to promote a group’s survival to the physical conditions within which they lived. Marxian perspectives also are materialist. As with processualism, Marxism assumes that the main point of human life is survival. We survive by turning the natural world into human resources through group labor. Labor is a social process, and laboring groups use technology to make the natural world into cultural products. The idea at its base is that cultural development can be explained by how people manipulate material assets for political gain. “Materiality” differs from the previous two derivatives of “material.” Inspired in part by Husserl, who famously urged us to turn to the things themselves, materiality studies reject laws of behavior and Cartesian or structuralist binaries, particularly the duality of people and things. It is a humanistic approach critical of the preceding two, and it is even critical of purely symbolic interpretations of things. On the other hand, new materiality is also critical of aspects of humanism. Those who follow this school react against human exceptionalism. What this means is that placing people at the center of our studies—­anthropocentrism— is incorrect. Instead, we should put things and people on a more level field, looking at the interrelationships between the two. Things and people define one another: they are mutually constitutive. Relations among things are parts of the structures that both enable and constrain us just as the actions and qualities of things themselves are constrained and enabled by their relations with us. Making people and things equivalent in our studies leads to the idea that things have agency. One kind of agency is secondary agency, a postulate of the British social anthropologist Alfred Gell. This concept strikes us as similar to Eric Wolf ’s distinction between power to and power over. Things have power over us in that the relations of which they are parts can direct our actions along a few viable paths. They probably do not, however, have the power to define and achieve goals. Within new materiality, there is no clear consensus, but the overarching approach has encouraged archeologists to think in new ways and has provoked us to ask questions different from ones we investigated earlier.

New Materiality Itself In this section we will review some of the “flavors” of New Materiality. We do not claim that this coverage is exhaustive; instead, we hope to cover many of the major positions so that readers can continue with their own study of this broad, still emerging approach. The aspects we will be covering are these: new animism; flat ontology; Latourian actor-network theory; symmetrical archaeology; assemblages; bundles; entanglement, entrapment, and enchantment; rhizomes; and finally meshwork. The sections

224  New Materiality

end with a consideration of Tim Ingold’s work on meshworks and taskscapes, an archaeological example, and, as usual, some thoughts about Naco (see Box 11.3). “Vibrant” Matter Cultural anthropologists have shown us that other cultures do not have the same worldviews as westerners. Archaeologists have come to apply this insight to past peoples, inspired by studies of North American indigenous groups, as well as examinations of societies from the Amazonian region of South America. These indigenous nations do not for the most part see a distinction between nature and culture, that is they do not incorporate western naturalism into how they see the world. For them, matter is alive and vibrant. The concept of animism has been applied to such points of view. In animism there are continuities uniting people, animals, and plants. These categories have different forms but share characteristics such as a soul. Because of the different outward manifestation seen in the categories, individuals in the groups see the world differently; this idea is known as perspectivism. Humans regard themselves reflexively, while animals, for example, are seen from a point of view outside of the creature itself. Specific attention to animals in relations to humans has become a focus for some archaeologists. A few have turned to examinations of how companion animals and people co-become, while others have tried to do non-­ anthropocentric zoological studies. Fundamentally, this animal turn, as it’s called, sees an expansion of social life to include people, animals, and even spirits. Processualists and Marxians brought the physical environment into the study of culture but as a source of materials needed to survive and gain power. New animists go further, seeing elements of a physical setting as ­v itally alive, as essential co-participants in a culture. Flat Ontology and Symmetrical Archaeology These terms are essentially congruent. In a flat ontology, people and things are treated as equals in an analysis of interrelationships. Symmetrical archaeologists urge us to work in the same way: treat all components of relational networks as individual entities with their own unique characteristics, making them different from other participants in the nets. Similar to archaeologists working within phenomenology, those interested in symmetrical analyses do not prejudge the components, but instead aim to bring a kind of naiveté to their studies, trying to allow the parts of a relationship system to be revealed as work proceeds. Some would even say that the components define themselves in the course of our investigations. To accomplish these goals, flat otologists have returned to detailed descriptions in a manner suggestive of phenomenological views. Symmetrical points of view also require that we look at the way archaeologists conduct

New Materiality  225

their actual work. We are subjective, even in categorizations. For example, in pottery analysis, some researchers privilege paste composition over decoration, while others do the opposite. This is a choice, and it is based on what the analyst thinks is more important—and the choice is subjective, based on our unique positions and ideas. In addition, this ontological position forces us to think about how past things influence us. Ancient things are in a sense created by us, but they also create us as investigators. In a personal example, Pat was certain halfway through her undergraduate days that she wanted to be an archaeologist. Her choice of area was influenced by two occurrences. First, her parents moved to Panama, and she found the culture there exciting. Second, when she was able to study prehistoric Mesoamerica in courses, the objects she encountered were beautiful to her, and the sites she studied fascinating. As she continued her studies, she found the interrelationships amongst ancient groups were exciting; these became even more interesting as she pursued the intellectual, that is, theoretical, side of archaeology. Pat could have followed her advisor in studying Peru, or pursued her other temporal and spatial interest, the Neolithic period in Western Asia and Europe, but Mesoamerica was more appealing. Within Mesoamerica, she was attracted to the southern portion, and as an artifact specialty, to ceramics. All of these decisions were subjective. They all resulted in her ever-deeper involvement in an ­ever-widening network of people (the folks with whom she works and those she teaches) and things (the present and past objects which she studies, and which continue to stoke her passion for archaeology). Understanding Pat as an investigator, according to symmetrical archaeology, is impossible outside this dense network. Some have suggested that archaeologists need to hold on to their sense of wonder about the past. This will direct them to see otherness, and prevent them from imposing modern and western ideas on situations that are substantially different from what they experience in their own lives. On the whole, then, flat ontology and symmetrical archaeology shape a changed way of looking at the past, one that features relationships rather than separateness between our analytical categories. Materials, plants, and animals are all parts of what we study and help shape who we are, our state of being. We should look at these things with a view that they are different from one another in ways that are not hierarchical, but mutually constitutive through practices of daily life. Actor-Network Theory One of the principal exponents of Actor-Network Theory is the French social scientist Bruno Latour (see Box 11.1). Latour’s ideas come from his studies on how scientists work, not the hypothesis-driven idealized version of science that early processualists favored, but actual observations of scientific inquiry.

226  New Materiality BOX 11.1 Bruno Latour Although Actor-Network Theory (ANT) was developed by several thinkers, and used and extended by a host of them, the name most commonly associated with ANT is Bruno Latour. Born in France in 1947, he obtained a doctorate in theology in Tours, but his work has combined philosophy with considerable inputs from anthropology and sociology. Latour did field work in Africa and California; in the latter place, he studied scientists and engineers while they were actively working. With Steven Woolgar, he carried out an ethnographic study of a neuroendocrinology laboratory at the Salk institute. From this they concluded that, contrary to many assertions, science is not rational, asocial, or a purveyor of universal truths; nor does science stand or fall on the results of individual experiments. Rather science is conducted through a complex set of relationships amongst a heterogeneous group—network—of human and non-human agents. “Non-humans” include all things except people, supernaturals and purely symbolic entities, and very large-scale entities that are combinations of humans and non-humans. There is no aspect of ANT that has not been criticized: the idea of “agent” and Latour’s definition of it; the concept of “non-human”; concepts of agency; the relationships between people and things—are they equal or not in an ANT network?; the perceived anthropocentric focus of network analyses, and the supposedly ignored importance of humans; and more. Latour himself has commented that most people who criticize or even use his work do not know what he is trying to accomplish. Nonetheless, what is usually taken away from ANT is a principle of general symmetry that includes humans and non-humans in some concept of a framework. Latour has published around 20 books and 150 articles, alone and with others; the most significant for our purposes are generally thought to be We Have Never Been Modern (1993), and Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (2005). Currently Latour is an emeritus professor at the Science Po university in Paris where he was associated with the program in political arts and the media lab.

Through his examinations, Latour came to see that science is not “done” by scientists, but rather the work comes about through the interactions of people with ideas, instruments, recording devices (even simple ones like notebooks and pencils), and many other sorts of objects. His insights lead Latour to focus on connections between people and things. He characterized these interactions as networks, pointing to the significance of what he calls actors and we might think of as agents. Without the things used in scientific

New Materiality  227

inquiry it would not exist, and so studies of science need to focus not just on and ideas and results, but also on the things which are inextricably tied up with those thoughts and findings. Latour’s emphasis on objects and how they are networked with humans has been a major inspiration for archaeologists: the connection to flat ontologies and symmetrical archaeology are clear. In contrast to these approaches, discussed immediately above, his assertion that networks are inherently unstable and in constant flux also resonates with archaeologists. Latour does give primacy to the human component of networks—his ontology is not quite “flat.” Nonetheless, ANT, the acronym for Actor Network Theory, was and is remarkably influential. One expected criticism as voiced by proponents of a symmetrical archaeology is his focus on people rather than giving people and things equal standing. Another potential issue is his assertion that the more connections there are to a specific person or object, the more “real” that entity is. In contrast, archaeologists tend to, at least at first, give equal weight to all parts of a network, and all parts are real. One issue with determining “reality” is that we cannot ask the human participants in a network how connected they are to the things in their world, nor can we observe interactions to asses for ourselves the nature and strength of connections. From ANT, archaeologists have also been inspired to look at the conduct of research itself: how are projects structured? What is the relationship between people doing archaeology and the tools of the trade? Has the change from, say, optical transits to the instruments known as total stations altered not just how we mark spatial locations, but also how we perceive space? We have already seen how feminist and queer-theory-oriented archaeologists have called for examinations of how archaeology is conducted. The call now comes from another quarter, this time stressing arguing that connections among people and things rather than people and social relations are just as important. A final point about ANT is that it is not actually a theory. Instead it is a strong suggestion that researchers, whatever their focus, need to make highly detailed descriptions of the components of a network. This has resonance for archaeologists, who have long insisted on the importance of description. New Materiality has brought this to the fore, and in that sense if no other, Latour is relevant to our considerations. Hodder himself has said that the difference between thick description (to borrow a term from Clifford Geertz, a noted cultural anthropologist) of objects, patterns, diversity, and change may be slight; and this alone makes Latour’s influence important. Assemblages This is not a new term in our field, going back to culture history, where an assemblage is a group of artifacts from one temporal period in a site. Another use is as the name for a group of objects from a depositional unit such as

228  New Materiality

a pit. This last is closest to the way assemblage is used in the new materialism, because items that come from a single depositional context were likely the results of intentional actions undertaken by those who aggregated the groups of things in the first place. In other words, those original actors brought the objects in an assemblage together deliberately. Assemblages in new materialism are historically contingent units, established for different time periods. Within a given time, the assemblages are coherent: one portion can be removed without destabilizing the whole. Any part of one assemblage can become part of another. All told, an assemblage is a heterogenous assortment of things that exist together in non-­h ierarchical relationships—a flat ontology. Because assemblages are historically contingent, however, their stability is limited, and in that sense they are unstable. Assemblages are alive in the sense that they are made up of vibrant matter. The vibrancy means that agency is distributed throughout the assemblage. The agency and capacities of the bodies—construed widely as living and non-living—determine the nature of the assemblage since its parts are interdependent. Those who champion assemblages say that the construct has many advantages. First, it is relational. Second, assemblages are dynamic: the combination of elements can bring new assemblages into existence. In a sense, assemblages are in motion, always changing, particularly since their parts can change at different paces. Think of popular music since 1950s. The styles of music have changed, as have the technologies. Some styles continue throughout the decades, such as songs in what’s known as the Great American Songbook; other genres have emerged, such as emo and hip-hop. There is also spatial variation in the assemblage: K-pop is not the same as Indonesian pop based on older musical traditions there. Still, there is an assemblage recognizable as pop music. Assemblages are also multi-scalar. A commonly used example is a Neolithic burial in the United Kingdom. The burial’s contents are an assemblage. Most burials from this time period have pottery as offerings. Each pot is itself an assemblage of materials and knowledge. Any set of attributes of a ceramic vessel, such as the techniques used to make it, is also a sort of assemblage. On a larger scale, there can be an assemblage of all the Neolithic burials within the borders of the UK that have pottery offerings. The assemblage concept can also accommodate older ideas such as typologies: typologies make sense of masses of data, and as such are themselves assemblages, in addition, individual types are also kinds of assemblages. Typologies, however, are developed by the investigators, so they may or may not reflect how ancient people ordered their world. This once again points out how the new materiality directs us to consider the relationships between archaeologists and what we study. The temporal aspects of assemblages cause us to think about units of time in different ways. Named periods give the impression of being static, with

New Materiality  229

change abrupt rather than gradual. Assemblage parts change at different rates due to flux within the compositional elements themselves and shifts in the relationships that obtain within the assemblage. Abrupt changes in total assemblages are rare. Rather, shifts in assemblage components are constantly in process. Consideration of assemblages and change bring us to problems with causation: there are no monocausal explanations of change, a position in contrast to some aspects of earlier materialist visions of the past. Causation is complex just as assemblages are complex. In fact, it may not be possible to separate cause and effect when the multiple aspects of change within assemblages are teased apart. Some archaeologists have suggested that ultimately there is no clear distinction between a thorough-going description of assemblages and explanations of their forms. Descriptions may point to a component that is more, or less, powerful within the changing entity, and we may be able to see components that together have a multiplier effect, with the combination more important than its parts. Because the assemblage concept is so flexible it appeals to many archeologists. It is a set of ideas with great promise for future work. Bundles The word “bundle” is used in many fields, from medicine, through business and economics, to computer science. For archaeology, the idea of bundles is similar to that of assemblages. Each is made up of a number of heterogenous items arranged, usually, without a hierarchical organization. The items are connected through interrelationships. Each has a temporal component: bundles can be added to through time just as elements can also be removed from them. Although the composition will change, time unites the components as new relationships are formed. Components of bundles can be objects, animals, people, and time, all of which taken together have an impact on social relations. Bundles, then, are flexible, in flux, and mutually constitutive with society; the concept comes to archaeology from studies of Native North American groups who have made, and still do make, sacred bundles that are handed down through time. These modern bundles change—things are added, others are taken away, but the bundles themselves always constitute, and are constituted by, interrelationships among diverse objects and people. Archaeologists working in North America were the first to apply the concept to prehistory, and while the approach has interested researchers elsewhere, for the most part bundles have not made as much of an impact on archaeological thought as has the concept of assemblages. In fact, some archaeologists have said that it might not be useful to apply such a ­culturally-bound and spatially delimited concept to very different times and spaces. It might be fine to apply the bundle idea to ancient Native North Americans, but is the term useful for pre-state populations in China, or

230  New Materiality

early settlers in lowland Mesopotamia? “Assemblage” seems to be a more elastic term than “bundle,” but it remains to be seen whether or not bundles are used to describe and understand the lives of people other than contemporary indigenous American groups and their ethnohistorically- and ­a rchaeologically-known ancestors. Entanglement, Entrapment, and Enchantment We are taking these three terms together because some researchers use them interchangeably, particularly entanglement and entrapment. The ideas represented are not entirely congruent, but are similar enough to be considered together (Figure 11.1). The idea of entanglement was largely introduced by Ian Hodder (see Box 11.2) to encapsulate the relationships he saw between people and things in his studies of Neolithic Europe; he later extended it to investigations at the Neolithic Turkish site of Çatalhöyük (sometimes spelled in English with a space between the “l” and “h”; the pronunciation is hard to indicate in English, but is roughly “hahtahl heuyuk” with the first “h” soft as in hue, and “heuyuk” more like the “h” in home; Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.1  Hodder’s entanglement. An example of entanglement used by Ian Hodder is house plastering at the Turkish Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük. In this diagram, the central item Hodder unpacks is the plaster itself. The arrows point to the five major entanglements; the thicker lines indicate the main attachments within each large category; and the thinner lines point to lower-level connections. People become dependent on (entangled with) things, and in turn the things depend on the people. Adapted from an original drawing by author Chris Doherty.

New Materiality  231 BOX 11.2 Ian Hodder Ian Hodder began his career within the Processualist school. Some of his earliest writings in the 1970s promoted the application of general principles drawn from economic geography to explaining the patterned distribution of ancient settlements across the landscape. Hodder started critiquing this approach in the early 1980s, championing the notion that human behavior is not the product of universal laws but an outcome of historical processes that shape the meaningful structure of each culture. He further questioned the Processualist premise that the cultural significance of artifacts and features could be reduced to their roles in certain basic tasks, such as securing sustenance and shelter from the natural environment. Instead, Hodder contended that the things we find were integral parts of the symbolic environments of those who made and used them. The emic meanings of these objects as well as their prosaic functions must be understood if we are to describe and explain the behaviors in which archaeological materials were used. Like ­ Binford, ­ Hodder also conducted ethnoarchaeological research, ­ frica. His goal was not to identify universal relations bethis time in A tween behaviors and their material correlates. Instead, Hodder used studies of living social groups to illustrate the complex ways in which artifacts and features are deployed strategically by people to accomplish objectives within systems of meaning unique to their culture. Hodder’s ongoing work at the Turkish site of Çatalhöyük illustrates his development of ideas of entanglement, or the ways in which people and things are deeply involved within networks that constrain and enable human ­actions and patterns of historical development.

The Neolithic period saw a profound change in how humans made a living. Archaeologists have suggested that before this time, people managed plants by weeding and perhaps burning over areas where seed crops such as wild wheat flourished. They may also have planted food-producing tress in concentrated groves. Managing is not the same as cultivating, and the groups practicing these techniques likely got most of their foods from foraging with some hunting. The Neolithic change was from foraging and management to cultivation and reliance on cultivated products as well as herded and then fully domesticated animals. The process was a long one despite the implication of rapid

232  New Materiality

Figure 11.2  Ç  atalhöyük plaster seen as assemblage(s). Using once again Hodder’s plaster at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, this diagram re-envisions ­plaster and plastering as a series of assemblages. The largest level is the plaster itself. Within that assemblage are five smaller assemblages. Nested within each of those are successively smaller assemblage units. Adapted from an original drawing by author Chris Doherty.

change implied by such phrases as the “Neolithic revolution”; Mesolithic people “became” Neolithic people, but only gradually. Hodder points out that the more humans relied on cultivated plants, the more plants relied on people for reproduction. Taking wheat as an example, the characteristics that make wheat kernels a storable, easily harvested crop are those that prevent its success in the wild: a hard outer coat that protects the seed, and a weak attachment to the stock, which makes it easier to separate seeds and stems. Hodder, among others, discusses how there is a mutualistic relationship between these plants and humans. The humans depend on the plants for food, and the plants come to depend on people for reproduction. This is in his terms a kind of entailment, a required relationship that cannot be severed without harm to both parties. He also points out the various other activities necessary for reliance on cultivation. The hard outer seed coating needs to be removed to make seeds both easier to cook and digest, and cooking techniques need to be adapted to what are essentially grass seeds; such seeds were used earlier on, but not in the great quantities that they were exploited by Neolithic folks. There are also other kinds of artifacts and features needed for reliance on cultivated crops: cooking utensils, storage facilities, grinding tools, and shelters adjusted for settled living, as opposed to shelters helpful for mobile populations. It should be said here that settled life is possible without cultivation, let alone full-scale agriculture: in places where there are abundant, storable natural resources

New Materiality  233

such as salmon runs, there is no need to move for adequate provisions. Most of the world lacks such abundant, physically concentrated natural resources, hence the need to move to exploit seasonal foodstuffs. The installations and artifacts necessary for this changed food procurement system do not make and maintain themselves—we have to take care of things, make and repair, shore up and resurface, in short, considerable time and labor are invested in things of all sorts that we need for this adaptation. This is also entailment, a mutual dependency that Hodder calls entanglement. Once people become reliant on cultivation there is no going back to foraging: the knowledge is lost, overwhelmed by what we need to know to be successful arborists, gardeners, and cultivators of the grasses that produce our seed crops. This is directional change, but not in the sense of culture “progressing” or moving “forward” into better times. Indeed, an argument can be made that farmers have a worse life than foragers. If a cultivated crop fails, what will replace it? Foragers can shift their procurement strategies to other foods when one is not as productive as it once was. Farmers put more time into growing, processing, and storing food than foragers do, and when animals are added to the mix, farming becomes an activity that requires attention every day of every year. Foragers do not have this sort of obligation, and likely had more leisure time than agriculturalists. Another way to think of this, Hodder says, is that people become entrapped in a web. We make the web, but the web also makes us, catching us in a mutually constitutive set of relations. The more things we use, the more we need them. The more things there are, the more we have to invest in those things. In a sense, this is a version of the relationships and activities included in the concept of assemblage. The difference is emphasis: entanglement focuses more on the human component of change, although Hodder does say that he is trying to de-center humans while pointing to the essential nature of things. A related idea, enchantment, was advanced by Alfred Gell, a cultural anthropologist who studied art from an anthropological, as opposed to an art historical or art production, point of view. Gell also included aspects of phenomenology in his thinking in obvious ways. He suggests that objects cast a spell of sorts over people—we become entranced, or enchanted, by things without entirely understanding what has gone into making them. We even, at times, are unaware of who made those things. This is particularly true of modern technology, but the idea can be extended back in time, at least to the point when all or most production was not done within a small social unit, and specialists took over manufacturing and construction. Enchantment does not have the currency of entanglement, but the idea is interesting to some archeologists. Rhizome The word “rhizome” in botany refers to the way some plants reproduce themselves; an equivalent term is rootstock. Rhizomes extend horizontally underground, and bud off from other rhizomes. When the connections

234  New Materiality

between linked rhizomes are broken, each segment that has a node can produce a new plant; they are sustained in part by roots that grow off of them. The term was introduced to social science through the work of Gilles Deleuze, a psychiatrist, and Felix Guattari, a political activist. Several of their books have been important counters to structuralism, and are also fundamental to some conceptions within postmodernism. To these thinkers, a rhizome indicates a chaotic yet integrated set of relationships with enormous potential to head off in unexpected directions. The rhizome, lacking a top or a bottom, is counterposed to tree structures, or dendritic approaches to social organization, which are inherently hierarchical and have central points. Rhizome networks are decentralized sets of nodes and the lines of tissue connecting them. They suggest unanticipated change and a lack of directionality in that change. The idea of rhizomes is present in some recent archaeological studies, but for the most part our discipline prefers other terms with similar implications. Meshworks, Taskspaces, and Material Flux Cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold (see Box 11.3) has been interested in the relationships amongst people, things, plants, and animals since his initial fieldwork with the Skolt Saami of Finland. Because of his interest in materials, his work has made inroads into archeological thought. The first part of Ingold’s theoretical ventures that have proven to be intriguing to our discipline is the concept of meshworks. A mesh is the set of interrelationships that includes humans, their things, plants, and animals. This is similar to assemblages and the concept of entanglements. Ingold has expanded his thought to include considerations of landscapes. He points out that human activity takes place in time and space. His second BOX 11.3 Tim Ingold Educated at Cambridge University, Tim Ingold sees himself as a sociocultural anthropologist with wide-ranging interests. His first field project was with the Skolt Saami, northeastern Finland. There he studied ecological adaptation, as well as ethnic politics and social organization. Work that interests archaeologists comes from his concerns with ecology and environment, perception of the environment, skill and technology, and the idea of meshworks discussed in this chapter. Intrinsic to his work is the idea of relationality, another factor that relates to contemporary archaeological thought. Most recently he has been working on combining anthropology with art and design.

New Materiality  235

concept is taskspace: all the tasks, or activities, that people carry out in daily life, especially as related to place. In carrying out actions, people move through space, and oftentimes actions are shaped by those physical spaces. The places that comprise the landscape in which we act are historical. By this Ingold means that earlier activities have shaped spaces and left their marks for later people to observe, and live within. In addition, the landscape portion of a taskspace is generative: it influences, and can even cause, human action. Tasks and landscape are mutually constitutive, a concept we have often looked at in other bodies of thought. The idea of taskscapes encourages us to look not just at people and things, even including time in those considerations, but in addition brings our attention to the larger setting of life. Space has implications for action, sedimented through time; each time we act we add to what makes up the landscape, and the multiple taskscapes it encompasses. The third way in which Ingold has been influential in archaeology is his calls to pay even more attention to things than we do already. His point, however, is that the materials that make up things are also in flux and can be unstable. A wattle and daub wall falls apart because it gets wet, and the clay constituting the daub cannot retain its shape. Ingold goes beyond this, however, suggesting that the molecular structure of the clay itself should be considered, as we should be looking at all the characteristics of all the materials people use: what in the composition of obsidian changes with time? How about wood, or the stone used for cut blocks? The idea of looking very deeply into the structures and materials making up things is in part a return to the materials science examinations of the processual era—not that they have ever entirely gone away. One problem with pursuing this sort of inquiry is the degree to which ancient people were aware of detailed material properties. To be sure, stone knappers knew that obsidian was better than chert or flint for making stone tools, and folks making and using grinding stone understood that hard materials such as basalt and granite made better ones than, say, limestone. But to grasp the underlying structure—the chemistry and physics of materials—is likely a task well beyond the capabilities of most of us at any point in time. How much does anyone know about the rare earths needed for cell phones, or the actual composition of the silicone used for some parts of prosthetics, or new-fangled muffin pans? For the most part, it remains to be seen whether or not Ingold’s ideas will have a long-term effect on archaeology. The meshworks idea, so similar to assemblages, may not have advantages. On the other hand, the taskscape concept may be very useful since it includes space and the historical construction of space and assemblages as mixture of people–thing entanglements.

An Archaeological Example For an archaeological example we will look at research done on images from the Neolithic site Göbekli Tepe, Turkey (G. Busacca 2017, the list

236  New Materiality

of ­Suggested Readings). The site’s round enclosures contain T-shaped uprights near their centers, as well as stones in an upside-down “L”-shape around the edges. Both forms have non-human entities carved on them: snakes, wild cattle, fox, and many others. Interpretations to date classify the depictions as predatory and male. In addition to these presumed roof supports, ­buildings have evidence of food preparation and serving which has been linked to probable feasting. The author of this paper believes that the focus thus far on stylistic and figurative properties would benefit from amplification. He therefore applies ideas from new animism, discussed above, to the images. The carvings’ orientations fall into one of two classes: the creatures on the edge stones are facing inwards, while those on the more central pillars tend to face downwards. In addition, some of the images are carved to represent aspects of motion, such as a set of five duck depictions that look like five stages of sequential movement. Moreover, Busacca, following previous assertions that the central “T”-shapes are anthropomorphic, suggests that the shapes and the carvings combined depict human–animal hybrids, or perhaps humans infused with animal spirits. New animism emphasizes the relationality of humans and non-humans, especially animals. Busacca looks at the Göbekli Tepe images in this light. He also takes from new animism the idea that at this site the images go along with animistic ideas about how humans and animals exist on a spiritual continual. Finally, he points out that the images appear to match a number of animistic ideas, such as the permeability of material borders. Combining image location, the kind of animals shown, the way they are carved to indicate motion, and the evidence for human visits and probable feasting at the enclosures, Busacca suggests that what happened in the constructions was encounters between animals and humans. People in the spaces would be surrounded by animals, forced in a sense to engage with them, and were therefore enacting human–animal interrelationships. All in all, the author amplifies previous discussions of the Göbekli Tepe images, moving them from discussion as decoration and possible artworks (in a Western sense) to consideration of them as themselves exemplars of the non-­ humans included in animistic points of view. He notes the experiences people in the enclosures would have had are like the stories of human–non-­human encounters that anthropologists have collected in ethnographic research.

Naco Valley Of the ways of looking at the world outlined above, assemblages interest us the most. In the ballcourt example in the earlier section on semiotics, there’s a glimpse of one sort of assemblage: the ballcourt as an object; the physical materials used to make that object; people involved in its planning and construction and the auxiliaries who helped the workers; local elites; Maya and their ideas about ballcourts, god, and heroes; all the knowledge needed for

New Materiality  237

ballcourt-associated activities; and the very many relationships amongst people and people, people and things, ideas, ideologies, and people; and the folks themselves who were involved. We’d like to take a specific example from the Naco valley work, one smaller than the ballcourt, and map out how it would look with an assemblage perspective. Shell working is likely the smallest-scale industry practiced by La Sierrans. There is one example of shell working in the north cluster, and one in the south cluster. Scraps and tools in the latter area were covered by Terminal Classic construction, but in the north cluster the evidence was found in a trash deposit behind a substantial platform that seemed to have been both a residence and a workshop. Even this larger example of making shell blanks was short-lived according to our reading of the evidence. Shell working, then, is the large assemblage in which other smaller assemblages nest. Starting with materials, what’s needed are the shells themselves and tools to work them. Conch shells, the kind used in our industry, apparently came from the Caribbean. They needed to be acquired by La Sierrans through a complex of relationships and likely some exchange of goods— what those goods might have been we don’t know, but there are many products from the site that are relatively light weight and easy to transport, such as cloth. Also coming with the shells were bits of coral; their use is unclear, but we think they might have served to smooth edges of shell pieces. There is a specific tool form found only with the shell deposits. It is made from chert, and is chipped into the shape of a small awl (the name for a tool used to pierce leather, though we don’t think our chert awls were used for this purpose). Our awls have rather blunt tips that show use wear—we think the use was to score shells so that they could be broken up into suitably-sized pieces. The chert for the tools likely came from a limestone ridge in the southwestern part of the valley—chert chunks have been observed there—but there are other places to get chert locally. Stone knappers made the tools; whether the artisans in shell also knapped chert, we don’t know, but the north cluster workshop also has evidence of obsidian knapping: cores and waste flakes. The north cluster folks might have made the chert items. The social relations involved shell procurers, shell workers in two parts of the site, those who made tools, and whoever it was who moved the blanks to Copán, where a shell workshop using conch was found, but not the materials for making the blanks. People also had relationships with the materials. The artisans needed to know the properties of the raw materials and tools, and how to apply tools effectively to the shells. Going back to one of Ingold’s points about flux in materials, the shells may have been influenced by the humidity, particularly in the rainy season when downpours can be extreme, changing their working characteristics. Skill sets likely were different between workers, also a kind of flux in the fabrication process.

238  New Materiality

The shell working comprised a range of materials, knowledge, and social ties. It was but one part of an extensive array of manufacturing activities, though a short-lived one, compared to pottery production or stone tool making. The stratigraphic relationships make the temporal component clear. Thus within the very large assemblage that we call workshop zones, the north and south clusters, there are smaller units that are themselves assemblages. There was likely overlap in the people involved, since tools for more than one craft are found in association in virtually every excavation. There is also a temporal component. One of our graduate advisors, the late Mayan architecture specialist William Coe, used to carry on at length about how dividing up the past into eras such as the Late Classic did injustices to what was going on. His point was that different aspects of culture change at different rates, and there was never a convergence of change at what archaeologists choose as the division between epochs. This point is also made by folks working with assemblages and similar constructs. Thinking back to bundles, one of their aspects is that items are added and withdrawn through time. The bundle remains a bundle, but the contents and the relationships shift. This is true of our workshops and their roles in assemblages. The shell stopped, but it was preceded and followed by work with pottery, cloth, wood, stone, fibers like palm fronds, and other materials. The tasks shifted, and so did the relationships. At one time there was a corps of elite residents who, according to our analysis, controlled the distribution of some desirable good, such as imported, painted pottery. The workshops existed before the elites who were responsible for the site core were born, and continued after those folks no longer had a site core, and, we believe, therefore went on to other activities in other places. No one part of any of the assemblages changed at the same rate as others. Think of potters. There is a considerable amount of knowledge that goes into making decent ceramics. Now think about the age span of Precolumbian people: perhaps 30 years on average. Knowledge about ceramics needed to be imparted quickly and thoroughly; but no matter how good the teaching, the next generation would be slightly different, in perspective, motor habits, and many other aspects. Change is constant. Considering our artisans in terms of their participation in assemblages, and all else that goes into an assemblage, helps highlight human–thing relations. We don’t think, however, that using the assemblage concept explains any aspect of source procurement, manufacturing, distribution, use, or disposal. The assemblage idea takes us to thick description of things and people and the relationships amongst all of the living and not-living elements. If we want to explain what we’ve delineated, we think that there are bodies of theory that are more helpful. In fact, we think assemblage theory, and the similar ways of thinking we wrote about above, aren’t really theories, in the senses that feminist theory and Marxist theory are. Thick, and thicker, descriptions are good and necessary, however, and thinking in terms of assemblages, entanglements, and so forth, should lead us there.

12 Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia

The land bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, encompassing large swaths of Iraq and southwestern Iran, has been the subject of archaeological attention for roughly two centuries. Researchers from Europe and the United States in particular were and are drawn to the area in large part because it has been consistently seen as a, perhaps the, crucible in which the bases of modern society were forged. Investigators in southern Mesopotamia, therefore, have grappled with events perceived as shaping world history. It is no surprise that representatives of all the schools of thought discussed thus far have applied their perspectives to reconstructing, and divining the significance of, what occurred between the Tigris and Euphrates. To the extent that these watercourses define the grand stage on which humanity took major steps towards creating how we live today, describing and explaining these developments are crucial projects for archaeologists of all theoretical persuasions. We will examine aspects of southern Mesopotamia’s research history as examples, on a general level, of how theories were put into practice by varied investigators. This discussion is not exhaustive. Certain approaches to Mesopotamia’s past are highlighted not because we think they are right but because they exemplify particularly well aspects of the theories discussed. Further, you should not mistake what follows as a summary of Mesopotamian prehistory. Rather, we are drawing on a voluminous body of research not to see what it can tell us about an area’s history, but for what it reveals about the role of theory in understanding that past. We begin with a brief review of southern Mesopotamia’s physical form and history before moving on to consider the ways in which theory and data were and are being related through the work of researchers operating within different schools of thought. In each case we are looking at the particular forms taken by theories and the methods used to gather data relevant to these interpretive structures.

Southern Mesopotamia Southern Mesopotamia covers approximately 15,000 km 2 (5,800 miles2) bordered by the Persian Gulf and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (Figure 12.1).

240  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia

Figure 12.1  Map of southern Mesopotamia showing sites mentioned in the text.

The environment is characterized by variation, especially in essential water supplies, over space and time. Fluctuations in rainfall both in southern Mesopotamia and the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers can produce severe droughts and destructive floods depending on the year. Similarly, the Tigris-Euphrates delta which formed where these rivers join the Persian Gulf is a swamp. Other tracts further upstream vary from well-watered fertile floodplains to dry grasslands. Complicating matters is the general scarcity here of certain basic natural resources, especially metal ores and stones suitable for making tools, weapons, and status-defining ornaments. Surviving in this environment required developing means to even out access to water and the crops and animals dependent on it over space and time as well as to acquire goods not immediately available. Given the challenges posed by this environment it is perhaps no surprise that southern Mesopotamia was not occupied until relatively late in Near Eastern prehistory. The earliest known settlers here were apparently migrants from northern Mesopotamia (Syria, southeastern Turkey, and northern Iraq) who arrived about 5,900 BC. They brought with them a fully developed agricultural and herding complex along with established trade connections throughout the Near East. Around 1,900 years later the population had risen considerably and signs of political hierarchies are evident in the forms of monumental, mostly religious, constructions and some distinctions in the sizes and degrees of elaboration of residences and burials. Most of these

Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia  241

markers of social distinction are found in the few towns that served as capitals of small political units (or polities). The leaders of these diminutive polities were closely tied to religious institutions devoted to worshipping deities. Temples were raised atop massive mud-brick platforms, or ziggurats, which physically dominated settlements and the landscape generally (Figure 12.2). These “priest-leaders” were apparently supported by tribute, in the form of food surpluses and labor, paid by town residents and the inhabitants of the smaller villages loyal to a capital. At approximately 3,200 BC there was a major political shift. Fully 13–15 towns now blossomed into cities, each containing several thousand people. Urban growth seems to have been fueled primarily by migration from the villages within each capital’s hinterland. Drawing in part on the labor of these city-dwellers, leaders of ever more powerful bureaucracies commissioned monumental buildings of unparalleled scale, once again primarily devoted to propitiating the supernatural. In addition, they supervised construction of irrigation canals that brought increasing tracts of land under cultivation, and collected large quantities of food paid out in tribute. Much of this growing power was apparently still vested in the hands of priest-rulers who controlled land, water, foodstuffs, and labor in the names of the gods they served. At the same time, a writing system called cuneiform came into use. An increasing number of texts written on clay tablets chronicle ever more complex economic and political relations among a wide array of powerful actors including representatives of governing councils and holders of private estates. From about 2,900–2,200 BC contests between these small states, and among factions within each of them, resulted in the increasing emergence of secular leaders and more dramatic hierarchical distinctions separating a wealthy, powerful minority from an ever more impoverished majority. Commoners were steadily losing land to religious and secular institutions. It is the period from 3,200–2,200 BC that has attracted most of the attention of a­ rchaeologists interested in when, how, and why the centralized,

Figure 12.2  G  eneral rendering of a ziggurat.

242  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia

hierarchically structured political forms familiar throughout the world today first emerged. It is these issues that most of the theories discussed below are devoted to illuminating.

Objects of Biblical Significance The first multi-year excavations conducted in the area were carried out in the nineteenth century, sponsored by the French and English governments and their national museums. This work was designed to secure spectacular objects associated with societies (primarily the Assyrians at first), personages, and events described in the Bible. An example of the sorts of finds excavated and put on display in Europe includes the friezes from the site of Nineveh which are now in the British Museum. These remarkable sculptures date to the ninth through seventh centuries BC and depict in great detail aspects of daily life as well as the often militaristic accomplishments of the center’s Assyrian monarchs (you can see some of these images here by clicking on the Assyrian Galleries: http://www.britishmuseum.org/visiting/galleries.aspx). Advances in the decipherment of cuneiform greatly accelerated interest in Near Eastern antiquities. This is the written language that appears in the texts and inscriptions found throughout such early foci of investigation as the sites of Nineveh, Nimrud, and Larsa. Beginning in 1837, the ability to read these ancient accounts allowed researchers to link rulers celebrated in such monuments as the Nineveh friezes to Biblical events and people. These translations also revealed early versions of the flood story which provided yet another connection to happenings familiar to most Muslims, Jews, and Christians from their readings about Noah. There was a strong impetus, therefore, to unearth and display materials that provided dramatic physical links to what were widely understood to be the roots of Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage. Their display in the British Museum and Louvre in London and Paris, respectively, also bolstered political assertions of control over a valued past by nations seeking international dominance in the present. It follows from these goals that digging in nineteenth-century Mesopotamia favored objects over context. Context in this sense refers to the horizontal and vertical associations among materials, including the soils in which they are embedded, as revealed during archaeological research. It makes a big difference whether the sheep bone, pot, and stone mallet recovered from a site are found next to each other near a hearth, separated within distinct soil levels, or grouped together in a pit with a human skeleton. That difference is context. It is only by recording these associations among dirt, artifacts, and features that we can tell the relative ages of materials and how those items that are found together might have been used in preparing food, honoring the dead, or some other activities. Today, it seems peculiar that early Mesopotamian specialists paid so little attention to context. But the considerable time spent recording these associations through notes, drawings, photographs, and the like, is only worthwhile

Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia  243

when you do not know what happened in the past, when it occurred, and you acknowledge that answers to both those questions are important. If the Bible, or some other canonical source, provides answers to such queries then the painstaking process of identifying the locations of recovered items only gets in the way of unearthing dramatic objects associated with a known past. Modern archaeology, like all sciences, is based on ignorance and doubt. For this reason, recording the contexts of what we find is crucial to shedding light on the histories of people about whom we often know very little. It is this paramount concern with context that sets professional archaeologists apart from looters who seek individual objects prized for their beauty and connections to aspects of a valued antiquity. Consequently, excavations conducted throughout most of the nineteenth century in Mesopotamia resembled modern looting more than the practices of professional archaeology. It is unfair to criticize these early researchers for failing to live up to the standards of a profession that did not as yet exist. What is important for our purposes is not to assign blame, but to recognize that the conduct of archaeology in Mesopotamia during the nineteenth century was strongly conditioned by a pervasive conceptual structure that saw the area’s history as known through Biblical accounts. The methods employed thus favored the retrieval of objects tied to that recorded past over testing hypotheses through close attention to context. The conceptual framework that channeled excavations in Mesopotamia throughout most of the nineteenth century treated material culture as a set of distinct objects. Their primary value lay in their capacity to evoke tangibly events, people, and places known from the Bible. The concept of “culture” has no obvious role to play in this approach save for the notion that Europe’s shared Judeo-Christian heritage arose in, and spread out from, Mesopotamia. The primary goal of these early studies was to illustrate, not to reconstruct and explain, that heritage. The methods employed therefore emphasized recovering objects rather than recording context.

Culture History and the Sumerians The limitations of the Biblical perspective were accidentally revealed while archaeologists worked under its guiding principles. Researchers in Mesopotamia gradually became aware that the people they knew from the Bible were late manifestations of earlier civilizations. What led to this realization was the recovery of ancient texts, copied and maintained by Assyrian scribes, which pointed to the existence of people who were ancestral to later, better known societies. Understanding the nature and history of Mesopotamian civilization would require reaching back to populations called the “Sumerians” who lived in time periods not recorded in the Bible. Work was then devoted to discovering people, places, and events for which there was scant, or no, textual documentation. New principles and methods were needed to pursue this study into uncharted territory. Those premises

244  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia

and techniques brought context to the fore in order to: define southern ­Mesopotamian cultures; identify the phases that made up their histories; put those intervals in chronological order; and explain the shifts that occurred over the reconstructed time spans. These steps are essential features of the culture history approach. Cultures and phases were defined by distinctive collections of material styles, especially in ceramics and architecture. These units, in turn, were ordered chronologically based on the results of deep stratigraphic excavations dug within the massive, physically prominent architectural complexes in ancient Mesopotamian cities. The earliest research foci were temples and their associated constructions. These large edifices often reached their final dimensions through a long process of building new temples atop older ones. Each temple platform encased its predecessor as in a set of nested dolls. The resulting sequence of distinct building efforts yielded a convenient means for identifying temporal changes in material styles over time since every phase was bracketed by distinct construction episodes. In order to fashion these chronologies researchers expanded the range of artifacts they collected. Previously such mundane objects as pottery sherds were discarded as uninteresting. Now changes in their styles were used to define the phases ordered temporally through stratigraphy. Phases defined by stylistic traits in artifacts and architecture were also treated as the remains of distinct cultures. Each phase was seen as pertaining to a particular, relatively homogenous, cultural unit. Changes in temporally diagnostic material styles were thought to have been introduced to a site by diffusion or migration. Research teams were, therefore, no longer primarily concerned with finding items that spectacularly illustrated a known past. This is not to say that dramatic discoveries were no longer being made. Excavations conducted from 1922–1936 of 1,800 burials at the city of Ur revealed 16 very elaborately outfitted tombs thought to have been the final resting places of the city’s leaders. Dating to the third millennium BC, these so-called “royal tombs” not only contained items of extraordinary craftsmanship but also attendants sacrificed to serve their masters and mistresses after death. Such lavish displays of wealth and power captured the world’s attention and strongly suggested that these early monarchs enjoyed a preeminence that might have matched the opulence exhibited by their Assyrian successors. Still, culture historians were primarily engaged in the project of defining phases, tracing the distribution of their diagnostic styles across the landscape, and searching for ever-older predecessors of known cultures discovered in ever-deeper excavations. As noted above, almost all of this work called for digging in ancient cities with large edifices whose extensive construction histories provided relatively clear temporal divisions linked to the rebuilding of architectural monuments. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the goals of exploring Mesopotamian sites had changed from anchoring Biblical accounts in physical remains to describing the roots of civilizations recorded in that text. The search was on for the Sumerians, seen as the creators of a pan-Mesopotamian

Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia  245

civilization carried forward by Assyrians, Babylonians, and, ultimately, ­t wentieth-century Euroamericans. Since the Bible does not describe these original inhabitants, their history had to be written through the study of material remains. Accomplishing that ambitious task required putting a variety of recovered objects in context, both vertically within stratigraphic sequences, and horizontally as styles diagnostic of phases which were used to trace cultural boundaries across multiple sites. Cultures, defined as associations of distinctive material traits, were crucial components of this new conceptual scheme. Their locations on the landscape and changes over time ­ igration and defined a history characterized, it was thought, primarily by m diffusion. Mesopotamia’s past in this scheme was important because the westward spread of its essential traits, particularly forms of government and writing, to Europe via Greece was thought to have formed the bases of ­European civilization. Basic culture historical principles and practices, such as the definition and temporal ordering of phases by such techniques as stratigraphy, remain central to all field research in southern Mesopotamia. After World War II, however, new questions were asked about this area’s past. It was still presumed that southern Mesopotamia played an important role in creating the modern world. Now that role was less closely and exclusively tied to the forging of European civilization. Instead, it dealt with the emergence of a political form that it was thought first appeared between the Tigris and Euphrates and had come to dominate the globe.

Processualism and the Rise of the State The political form in question is the state. When processual archaeologists refer to the “state” they generally are talking about a mode of social and political organization characterized by: 1) political centralization, with power concentrated in a few hands and backed with coercive force monopolized by the power holders; 2) hierarchies, in which all members of a society are ranked within one overarching system by virtue of their differential access to power and wealth; and 3) social differentiation, referring to variations in the activities pursued by, as well as the composition of, social groups making up the state. States differ considerably in their outward forms. Each has its own religion, language, customs, and laws, for example. Nonetheless, many argue that the above three elements constitute a core of functionally interconnected parts that evolve in a predictable manner. Processual archaeologists argue that even within different, historically unrelated world areas the state emerged from of a sequence of earlier, simpler, socio-political forms. These universal evolutionary processes were, in turn, driven primarily by the need to adapt to

246  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia

ever-changing material challenges. Of these, pressure on the food supply posed by rising human populations was thought to be especially significant. All patterned human behaviors, including the use of power, are explained in processualism when: 1) they are set within the original adaptive systems in which they functioned; and 2) their contributions to promoting those adaptations are identified. Southern Mesopotamia became an important arena for understanding state formation processes because populations residing in this area during the fifth through fourth millennia BC were seen as especially precocious in creating this political form. Of the many processual theories offered to describe and explain state formation here, we will limit ourselves to the influential approach proposed by Robert McCormick Adams (see Box 12.1).

Cities, Storage, and Power In several widely read books dating to the 1960s through the early 1980s Adams argued that power concentration, hierarchy, and social differentiation were coping mechanisms. They emerged to deal with spatial and temporal fluctuations in food and water supplies under conditions of rising populations.

Box 12.1  Robert McCormick Adams Robert McCormick Adams was one of the major figures responsible for translating the principles of processualism into research strategies pursued in southern Mesopotamia. Beginning in the early 1960s, Adams played an especially crucial role in introducing the methods of systematic settlement survey to the region. Since that time these procedures have been increasingly enshrined as common practice by archaeologists working there and in other parts of the world. Through his settlement research Adams encouraged all archaeologists to pay attention to the structures of ancient landscapes made up of sites of all sizes, inhabited by people of diverse classes, pursuing varied tasks, and adjusting to sundry ecological variables. As a result, we now have a broader appreciation for the complexity of ancient societies than when we concentrated primarily on the study of a few large cities. Adams’s comparative research into processes of increasing sociopolitical complexity has also inspired numerous archaeologists conducting investigations within and beyond the processualist school.

Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia  247

These ecological conditions challenged the capacities of southern Mesopotamia’s inhabitants in a number of ways: a) Evening out the effects of unpredictable floods and droughts over time. b) Distributing food to people engaged in a variety of work. c) Balancing such complementary economic pursuits as herding in dry grasslands, farming along floodplains, and fishing in the delta. Population growth magnified pressure on people to increase food yields by specializing in producing goods appropriate to different ecological zones. Such specialization promoted social differentiation. This development—­differentiation—in turn required societies to create mechanisms for assuring general access to food and materials among those involved in different economic activities. Cities emerged as a solution to these adaptive problems. It was here that institutions charged with collecting, storing, and distributing food appeared, initially under the leadership of priests acting as agents of powerful deities. These religious leaders came to dominate systems of tribute by means of which large quantities of basic foodstuffs were acquired, in the names of the gods, from diverse primary producers. Foods were then used in several ways: 1) 2) 3) 4)

Doled out to people in times of drought or flood. Redistributed among those engaged in complementary economic pursuits. Traded for essential goods not available in the immediate area. Used to support artisans producing a variety of items for both long-­ distance exchange and local consumption.

Through their control of essential food supplies priests came to occupy the upper reaches of society-wide hierarchies. From their social pinnacles, they exercised power over those who increasingly depended on them for the very means of survival. The exercise of such power ensured cooperation among growing populations in the common enterprise of adaptation. The system’s success was enhanced by the temple-controlled construction of ever larger irrigation systems that brought more land under cultivation. Newly watered land contributed larger yields needed to sustain expanding populations. Management of extensive irrigation systems may not have ­inspired state formation, but mobilizing work parties to enlarge and maintain these canals invested ever more responsibility and power in state bureaucracies.

Processualism and the Expansion of Research Designs Culture historical research required new methods to address novel issues. Studying the state through a processualist lens also led to the development of new research designs. The state is defined as a coherent body of functionally interdependent parts whose interactions are controlled by an administrative hierarchy. Consequently, research must be carried out in all portions of that

248  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia

integrated system to describe its operation and identify changes in it. It was essential that relations among members of different classes, occupations, and residential groups be understood so that the administrative functions of the state could be described and their emergence explained. If there was a causal relation among demography, food supplies, and administrative structures, then information on such variables as the timing and rate of growth in population, storage facilities, irrigation canals, and signs of administrative control must be documented. Gathering the needed data meant that study was required in rural areas surrounding urban centers. Investigations could no longer be focused solely on the large cities that had attracted virtually all archaeological attention up to now. Rural settlements were discovered through systematic settlement surveys (Figure 12.3). Based on the distributions of sites of all sizes, archaeologists inferred changes in population numbers and distributions with respect to key environmental variable such as water courses. Variations in the extents of contemporary settlements and the dimensions of the buildings they contained were also used to infer the existence of, and shifts in, administrative hierarchies. These inferences were based on the notion that architectural scale correlated with the power of the elites who commissioned those buildings. Similarly, settlement size reflected the variable ability of leaders to attract and hold followers. Defining site hierarchies using these measures became a way of inferring the existence of power differences and administrative structures. In order to figure out the range of ancient activities pursued in different ­locations, excavations were initiated in sites of diverse dimensions, time periods, and locations. If states administered complex economic and social relations for the benefit of all, then it was important to know about producers. Who were the workers? What did they make? How much did they manufacture? Where were the workspaces or workshops? Were tasks done year-round or seasonally? Finally, archaeologists wanted some sense of how these tasks were coordinated through the actions of various bureaucrats. Investigations were greatly aided by the decipherment of cuneiform. Texts in this writing system provided crucial information on economic transactions among state institutions and their various constituents. Written accounts, however, did not yield all the information needed to map out adaptive relations among all segments of society. Archaeological survey and excavation were needed to test and amplify textual sources. The search for evidence of behavioral variability across time and space also resulted in a dramatic expansion of the array of data collected by archaeologists. Chronology, based in part on changes in material styles, certainly did not wane as an important concern. Understanding the operation of adaptive processes required tracing changes among demographic, ecological, technological, social, and political variables over phases defined using culture historical techniques. Researchers increased their concern with studying the contexts of artifacts and features, not just to define temporal spans, but to see what those materials were used for at any one moment. Relations among finds, therefore, had a behavioral, not just chronological, story to tell.

Figure 12.3  Example of a map depicting settlement distributions. In this case, the map graphically represents the disposition of sites with respect to water courses during the Early Dynastic (2900–2373BC) phase in southern Mesopotamia. Drawn after ­Figure 2 in, Adams, R. M. (1966) The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.

250  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia

The definition of what constituted archaeologically relevant materials was also enlarged. Faunal and floral remains, previously deemphasized if not ignored in excavations, were now avidly sought. They provided information on past environments and the means employed to exploit them. Ecological data were especially relevant to assessing Adams’s theory that coordinating the movement of matter and energy among social groups was a cause of state formation.

Processualism and the State Adams’s theory of state origins highlights certain basic assertions of processualism: 1) Society, not the individual, is the basic unit of adaptation. 2) Societies are systems composed of closely interrelated parts that function together to promote political unity and the physical survival of their members. Based on these premises, archaeologists proposed that the core features of the state (power concentration, hierarchy, and social differentiation) arose not to enhance the lives of a few, but to preserve the integrity and coherence of entire societies. In this way the physical survival of their members was assured. New methods were developed to reconstruct these social groups and the adaptive processes that shaped them. Adams also argued through the early 1980s that processes of state formation are universal. The political changes seen in southern Mesopotamia were not unique to that locale. Instead, the structure of the Mesopotamian state is composed of the same basic elements of power concentration, hierarchy, and social differentiation that appear in other world areas. Similarities among early states are due to the operation of similar adaptive processes. To be sure, each state is structured to ensure that it offers an effective adaptation to specific ecological conditions. There is no one factor, such as irrigation or environmental diversity, which drives state formation in all times and places. Rather, the state emerges as a way to meet the threat to social continuity and ­coherence posed by the universal problem of rising populations. Each instance, however, ­happened under certain specifiable ecological circumstances. One goal Adams, and processualists in general, wanted to achieve, was identifying which environmental, technological, and demographic variables combined to generate the administrative apparatus of the state in various times and places. If this could be done, archaeology could then develop a powerful set of laws governing relations among power and adaptation in all human societies. Culture and history were dramatically redefined in Adams’s research in comparison to earlier culture history investigations in southern Mesopotamia. Culture was now an adaptive system, not a body of stylistically distinctive traits to be traced over space and time. Within each cultural system, artifacts, features, plants, and animals were understood in terms of how they

Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia  251

were put to use in promoting the survival of societies and the individuals who belonged to them. In addition, the perception of history shifted. Initially history was seen by culture historians as a unique sequence of events shaped primarily by the cultural forces of diffusion and migration. In the new perspective, history is a process governed by adaptations that linked aspects of culture and environment in predictable ways.

Marxism and the State of Power Processualists tend to talk of power in the passive voice. Relationships of inequality happened as a consequence of adaptive processes. Marxians of various stripes, in contrast, speak of power as an objective people sought, with the state as the means of gaining it. Just as there are a number of processual theories of state formation in southern Mesopotamia, there are several Marxist-­inspired approaches to explaining the emergence of this political form. We will consider two of these here. The first, promoted by Igor Diakanoff (see Box 12.2), derives from the strong tradition of scholarship developed by researchers from the former Soviet Union. The second perspective, that of Guillermo ­A lgaze (see Box 12.3), examines how the appearance of the state was tied up with ­developments in neighboring areas, especially northern Mesopotamia. Considering these two theories allows us to appreciate how the same basic principles can be applied by different researchers operating in the same school.

Box 12.2  Igor Diakonoff Igor Diakonoff was one of the most prominent students of ancient Near Eastern languages working in the twentieth century. Throughout his career he translated texts from different epochs of Near Eastern history written in Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Elamite, Hittite, Uratrian, and Hurrian. Diakonoff’s close analyses of these materials formed the bases of his studies of early Near Eastern political economies and general trends in human sociopolitical evolution. He worked throughout most of his career firmly within a Soviet tradition that stressed the importance of Marxist principles, especially processes of class formation and exploitation, in explaining human behavior. Nevertheless, Diakonoff maintained close contacts with scholars from around the world who espoused different perspectives. In part because of the high regard in which he and his work were held by a wide range of students of the Near East, his publications were very influential beyond the field of linguistics and among non-Marxists. Archaeologists of different nationalities working in the area especially drew on, and debated, his insights.

252  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia Box 12.3  Guillermo Algaze Guillermo Algaze has spent much of his professional career, beginning in the middle 1980s, conducting archaeological investigations in southeast Turkey. He has long focused on the impact southern Mesopotamian states had on the presumably smaller, more simply organized political units of northern Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium BC. In the course of grappling with this issue, Algaze became one of the first archaeologists working in the Near East to apply a modified version of world systems theory to understanding processes of inter-societal interaction. Controversial from the start, Algaze’s casting of northern Mesopotamia as a periphery of southern Mesopotamian cores continues to stir significant debate. As work by Algaze and other scholars has proceeded, especially in Turkey, there is increasing recognition that the northern Mesopotamian realms were not as small and politically simple as many had thought. Consequently, Algaze has modified his position to take account of these new findings. His book, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization: The Evolution of an Urban Landscape (2008) provides an updated summary of Algaze’s views on relations among local and inter-societal interactions in the creation of early southern Mesopotamian states.

Seizing Power and Wealth with Class Diakonoff contended that the state’s emergence was intimately bound up with changes in the relations of production, the social means by which technology was put to use securing, processing, using, and exchanging resources. He argued that in the earlier, pre-state societies of southern Mesopotamia small quantities of food were grown by, and more-or-less evenly distributed within, groups of relatives. These relations of production produced limited amounts of food, yielding what Diakonoff called a “hungry egalitarianism.” Efforts to increase productivity required new relations of production. At the center of these were social classes distinguished by their different relations to property and surplus. The upper class, which had appeared by 3,200 BC, was initially dominated by priest-rulers. In the names of the gods they enjoyed privileged rights to large tracts of productive land watered by irrigation ­canals. These fields were worked, in turn, by members of a much lower class who were wholly dependent on their rulers for support. Those clients and slaves provided the labor needed to increase food production by cultivating extensive fields, herding numerous animals, and digging and maintaining the irrigation channels that made large-scale farming possible. Productivity

Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia  253

was further enhanced by demands for tribute levied by rulers on members of an intermediary class made up of free farmers and herders. Though these “freemen” owned their own land, often as members of kinship groups, they were forced to develop means to increase yields to meet the demands of the state for food and other goods. Failure to do so could well result in loss of their land and removal to the class of temple clients and slaves. Thus, a “hungry egalitarianism” was replaced by a very productive economy, the outputs of which in the form of land, food, and other goods were unevenly distributed among people belonging to at least three distinct social classes. These exploitive relations generated tensions within southern Mesopotamia’s early states. As noted in Chapter 5, Marxians often invoke ideology, the body of beliefs generally shared by members of a society, to understand how such tensions can be calmed. Hence, priestly leadership was rationalized and placed beyond question by belief in divine rule. Those who wielded power and accumulated wealth did so at the bidding of the gods and with their blessings. Belief, however, was bolstered in southern Mesopotamia by military threat. Priest-rulers invested some of their economic gains in subsidizing a permanent fighting force composed of temple clients. Since no other social group had access to comparable surpluses, no one could support a force of arms approaching in size, training, and organization the one maintained by the temple. Ideological and military power, based on unequal economic relations, were therefore concentrated in a few hands and marshaled in defense of privilege. Diakonoff and his colleagues recognized that centralized power in Mesopotamian states was not absolute, nor did it necessarily follow clear class lines. From the very beginning priestly authority was checked, to some extent, by councils of prosperous citizens whose economic well-being was t­ hreatened by the growth of temple landholdings and wealth. Further, by 2,800 BC secular leaders were challenging priests for political supremacy and the economic resources underlying it. Tensions among these factions sometimes broke out in open conflicts that could change who controlled the state and how they organized its relations of production. Marxians tend to look to these sorts of competitions over the relations of production to explain political change.

Expanding the Analytical Scope: States, Colonies, and Inter-Regional Exploitation Many Marxian analyses of ancient states, like those practiced by their processualist cousins, focused on developments that took place within particular societies. The crucial processes yielding hierarchical social relations and power centralization involved interactions among groups of people who lived together and drew resources from the same immediate environment. Inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory (WST), some researchers began to challenge this perspective.

254  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia

We discussed world systems theory in Chapter 5. In essence, Wallerstein argued that exploitive modes of production can operate over extensive spatial scales, incorporating multiple societies. Unequal exchange relations among members of these networks result in the enrichment and empowerment of cores and the impoverishment and disempowerment of their peripheries. World systems theory encouraged researchers to appreciate that: 1) all societies were linked in significant ways within expansive structures that included groups organized at varying levels of complexity; 2) what occurred within any part of an interaction web required specifying a society’s place within the flow of goods that characterized this network; and 3) those transactions were inevitably unequal in character and affect, thus helping to create political and economic hierarchies at local and regional levels. Guillermo Algaze applied these lessons to understanding the emergence of states in southern Mesopotamia. He argued that sustaining such large, complexly organized realms depended on acquiring commodities not available in the Tigris and Euphrates delta. Though rich in fertile soils, this area lacked such basic goods as timber, oils, stone, and metals used to make buildings, tools, weapons, and objects needed to distinguish peoples’ positions within increasingly stratified societies. Consequently, the emergence of southern Mesopotamian states depended on the ability of their leaders to obtain ­reliable supplies of essential imported items, primarily from northern ­Mesopotamia where sources of many of the needed raw materials were located. This goal was achieved in large part by the establishment of southern Mesopotamian colonies at strategic points along riverine and overland trade networks. Enclaves were staffed by representatives from the different southern Mesopotamian polities, each of which was competing for control of valued imports. In some cases the outsiders were “guests” of established indigenous populations, settling in neighborhoods within pre-existing settlements. In others, the colonies were more sizable, representing state imposition of southern Mesopotamian organizational forms and practices on native peoples. No matter what a colony’s form or mode of establishment, it could be recognized by the appearance of distinctive styles of artifacts, features, iconography, and administration (especially modes of record keeping) that had clear ties with southern Mesopotamia but seemed out of place in northern Mesopotamian contexts. According to Algaze, the purpose of these enclaves was to promote the efficient transfer of goods back to the homeland. Based on WST principles, Algaze predicted that, once established, trading relations contributed to the underdevelopment of peripheral societies. This is because the latter lacked the military forces and bureaucratic structures needed to resist the demands of their larger, more powerful, and complexly organized southern neighbors. Hence, the agents of core states could set the

Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia  255

terms of exchange to their advantage. The result was that peripheral societies would become increasingly over-specialized in the extraction of resources for export. They would thus fail to develop local industries that might convert those assets into a diverse array of finished goods for local use and trade. Further, they would have been systematically stripped of raw materials by representatives of core states. Resources that might have been used to enrich local leaders and to support the creation of independent, economically diversified northern Mesopotamian states were instead channeled southward. Here they fueled the expansion of craft industries using foreign raw materials and contributed to the economic power of paramount lords who controlled those industries. Diakonoff had argued that the world’s earliest states were founded on exploitive economic relations among classes distinguished by their variable control over property, labor, and surpluses. Algaze extends these exploitive relations to include the asymmetrical terms of trade that prevailed between core rulers and peripheral producers. That northern Mesopotamian societies were not as disadvantaged as might be expected given the expectations of WST was due, Algaze argued, to the relatively short duration of the southern Mesopotamian colonial system. These and other Marxian approaches to state formation require much the same sorts of data gathered using many of the same methods employed by their processualist colleagues. Information on ecological, economic, social, and political variables obtained at all sites that comprise a state, from urban capital to rural farmsteads to distant colonies, is essential for tracking relations among politics, production, and exchange. Research must, therefore, combine survey and excavation conducted at a wide array of settlements situated in diverse locales. Only in this way can data be acquired that are relevant to evaluating hypotheses based on theories such as the ones proposed by ­Diakonoff and Algaze. In part, the above methodological similarities are due to the materialist stances of both schools. Marxians and processualists argue that the physical conditions of life, especially the ways in which people extract and use resources from the environment, are critical to explaining social forms and changes. As a result, ecological variables must be measured through survey and excavation. In addition, processualist and Marxian approaches presuppose a view of cultures as systems of interrelated parts. These parts are differently defined by the practitioners of each school. In both cases, however, the behaviors through which cultural systems take shape and are transformed are variably enacted in different locales spread across and beyond an ancient realm. For example, whether irrigation is designed to feed many mouths or expand the productivity of estates worked by slaves, understanding its operation requires specific kinds of work. Essential to that study are mapping canals and investigating the different sites involved in their functioning, from the homes of primary producers to the administrative offices of state functionaries. No one site, no matter how large, is “typical” of an ancient state. Consequently, field research must be conducted in a wide array of locales.

256  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia

Diakonoff’s and Algaze’s theories focus on ancient political economies (the ways in which processes of production, consumption, and exchange are manipulated by those seeking power). To these and other Marxian researchers, political economies are structured according to exploitive relations based primarily on class differences. Changing political structures result, in large part, from the ability of a few to mobilize and manipulate economic resources in efforts to centralize power in their own hands and to create hierarchies that they dominate. Ideology and coercion were mobilized to defend social privileges, but such efforts are never completely successful. Instead, the state is and was an arena in which social classes, and factions within them, contend for the reward of power by attempting to control economic resources (such as irrigation agriculture, slave labor, and trade goods) in ways that benefit them and disadvantage everyone else. The scale at which these processes operated differs between the two perspectives. Diakonoff emphasizes unequal interactions within particular realms while Algaze expands the analysis to include economic and power relations that were acted out across larger territorial expanses and involved multiple societies organized in different ways. As distinct as these theories are, they are unmistakable products of the Marxian theoretical school. Material culture in both processual and Marxian approaches is understood as serving to promote the operation of a society. It functions in large part to extract matter and energy from fields, herds, crafts, and through trade, and to signal status distinctions. To Marxians, however, artifacts and features also figured in power contests and these functions are as important in describing and explaining past cultures as were their roles in energy extraction. Adams, Diakonoff, and Algaze concur as well that the histories of each culture are not unique but conform to regularities that emerge from the action of universal causal principles. The difference lies in what drives that universal history, what goals societies and factions seek, and how behaviors and material culture function to meet these aims.

Interpretivism: Fragmenting the State Interpretivists reject attempts to define universal phenomena (such as the state) that can be explained according to broadly applicable principles (such as adaptation and competition for power). In their view, it is more productive to describe the varied forms societies can take and to understand the unique histories out of which those arrangements arose. Consequently, one set of related topics that interpretivists address in southern Mesopotamia include: 1) How people of different genders, ages, ethnic backgrounds, and classes experienced relations of power and hierarchy in their daily lives. 2) How these experiences gave rise to diverse social identities that fragmented the unity of ancient realms. 3) What were the distinctive historical sequences that yielded these varied social and political forms.

Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia  257

In pursuing the above interests, some interpretivists allow for more human agency in sequences of culture change than do their processualist and many of their Marxian colleagues. For them, human behavior occurs within a matrix of structural constraints, of which power relations are especially prominent. The constraints exclude and preclude some actions, enable others, but determine none of them. It is by making choices within this matrix of possibilities that cultures take shape and are reproduced. In addition, they are transformed by actors behaving strategically in pursuit of their own interests, though rarely are they aware of their actions’ full implications. Because interpretivism encompasses such a wide array of approaches to understanding the past it is hard to select one case that illustrates how its principles have been applied to the study of southern Mesopotamia. Susan Pollock’s (see Box 12.4) extensive writings on the region, however, provide a number of examples of this approach from which we will draw one for consideration here. Box 12.4  Susan Pollock Susan Pollock has been investigating developments in Mesopotamia and its environs for more than three decades. Pollock argues that processual interpretations of sociopolitical and economic developments within southern Mesopotamia of the fifth through third millennia BC stress the operation of broad forces, such as adaptation, that allow no room for human agency. They also tend to treat ancient societies as homogeneous wholes, largely untroubled by internal divisions except those of class. In contrast to these perspectives, Pollock has consistently argued for a vision of southern Mesopotamian realms as populated by different factions whose members enjoyed varying control over such essential economic factors as land, irrigation water, imports, and the labor to convert those resources into food and craft goods. Differential participation in these economic operations resulted in distinctions in the power wielded by members of various social groups. Pollock’s attention to the linkage between political and economic processes in understanding culture change is an interest she shares with scholars working in the Marxian school. She looks, however, beyond the development of socioeconomic classes that Marxians often emphasize. Instead, she draws inspiration from feminist theory, examining how social identities, especially those based on gender, were affected by and effected transformations in ancient southern Mesopotamian political economies. The sociopolitical structures that emerged from these struggles are diverse, products of their own unique histories. Those histories, in turn, were

258  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia shaped by the variably successful strategies of agents working as parts of diverse factions to secure the resources they needed to define and achieve their goals. This is a grassroots approach to understanding the genesis of the inequalities and oppressions thought to be characteristic of the state.

Power and Gender In one of her analyses, Pollock focuses on shifts in gender relations that occurred during the period of increased political centralization and hierarchy building dating to about 3200 BC. Gender refers to cultural constructions of sexual differences. Gender is not sex but a culturally conditioned understanding of sex’s social significance. Pollock argues that shifts in power and economic relations around 3200 BC provided an opportunity for some actors, primarily upper class men, to define gender’s meanings to their benefit. She pursues this point by exploring artistic representations of women and men at work. These appear primarily on carved seals used to mark claims of ownership to certain forms of movable property, such as grains and liquids. Men appear on the seals engaged in a variety of tasks, sometimes acting alone, sometimes as parts of groups doing such chores as herding and farming. Crucially, a few men wearing distinctive net skirts occasionally are shown in positions of authority, for example, leading troops and processions, and making offerings to the gods. Women are never shown as leaders. Invariably they are parts of groups carrying out repetitive, menial tasks (Figure 12.4). The participants in these chores are not distinguishable as individuals. Pollock sees in this pattern the emergence of a gender hierarchy that generally, if not invariably, subordinated most women to some men. Certainly, many males worked in menial jobs like their female counterparts. Members of both genders served as clients and slaves of large institutions such as temples. These powerful corporations, however, were always depicted as being led by men, never women, pointing to a rather firm limit on the aspirations of all women. Art is not life. Art often represents life less as it is than as artists and consumers of art wish it would be. Ideologies that blatantly misrepresent social relations, however, are unlikely to be shown in pictorial representations that span centuries. Thus, the seals’ depictions of gender relations have to be taken as legitimate statements about some aspects of ancient lived experiences. Pollock’s interest in this instance has less to do with general processes of state formation than with the ways changing political relations in one area at a specific point in time worked to divide societies into different interest groups. Each segment of society was characterized by diverse lived experiences. The change she highlights is the concentration of land and its products into the hands of powerful oikoi, or large households that employed clients and slaves to work their properties. Some temples were organized as oikoi,

Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia  259

Figure 12.4  D  esign from a southern Mesopotamian cylinder seal showing the ­relation between subordinate men and women, on the one hand, and the food they produced and offered to higher powers, on the other. Drawn after Figure 13.2 in Pollock, S. and Bernbeck, R. (2000) “And They Said, Let us Make Gods in our Image: Gendered Ideologies in Ancient Mesopotamia,” In Alison Rautman (ed.) Reading the Body: Representations and Remains in the Archaeological Record (pp. 150–164). ­Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

though the number of secular entities structured in this way apparently increased with time. Lacking access to the means of production, laborers in oikoi depended on their employers for support in the forms of standardized rations or access to land they could farm but never own. The gender hierarchy represented in carved seals emerged as part of these transformed productive relations. Women and men were conscripted into lives of clientage and slavery. Women almost never appear in any other context. This suggests that they suffered more from this kind of exploitation than did their male counterparts. Whether they were slaves captured in war or clients who had lost access to the productive resources obtained through membership in land-owning kinship groups, women were especially vulnerable to incorporation within oikoi. By extension, their labor formed the backbone of productive arrangements that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of the few men who led these early corporations. Political centralization and hierarchy building were, therefore, not disembodied processes operating ­according to the dictates of abstract principles of adaptation or class formation. Instead, they came about through the decisions of actors who maneuvered successfully to exploit female bodies in strategies of economic domination initiated by, and benefitting, upper class males. Rather than unifying society and benefitting all its members, as Adams argued, or uniting people within distinct classes, as Diakonoff contended, power concentration and hierarchy building fragmented social groups along gender lines and disproportionately disadvantaged women. The methods used to gather data needed to assess Pollock’s hypothesis are much the same as those used by processualists and Marxians. Exploring the ways in which societies are fragmented along lines of gender, class, ethnicity,

260  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia

and the like requires information collected from urban and rural sites as well as a wide array of settings in each settlement. If anything, the spatial and temporal scale of analysis must be particularly fine-grained for interpretivists since they cannot take for granted that information gathered from any one site, or portion of a settlement, is typical of behaviors and cultural patterns practiced throughout the place examined. There is every reason to suspect that the experience of being a woman, for example, varied by class, ethnic group, age, and occupation. The gender hierarchy depicted on seals may convey a general picture of interpersonal relations. Interpretivists know that life is rarely that simple. Investigating this issue, therefore, would require extensive excavations covering a wide array of residential groups at specific sites. Such work should get past generalities to the specific strategies different groups of women in different structural positions employed to negotiate their relations with power. Pollock’s account of gender differences highlights the general interpretivist notion that cultures are not homogenous entities. They are fragmented by the varied experiences of people who likely share broadly acknowledged premises but perceived those principles differently based on their divergent life histories. Part of what makes up those histories are factors such as gender. But gender and other categories are not universal in their behavioral content or consequences. For this reason, the gender hierarchy outlined here was not inevitable. Instead, it arose from a specific set of circumstances that bore bitter fruit for some people living in one area at one moment in time. Artifacts, features, faunal and floral remains are of interest to interpretivists for the meanings they conveyed to those who made and used them. These finds are still significant for how they functioned to promote adaptation or to gain power. From an interpretivist perspective, however, they are more important for looking at meaning. Understanding what it meant to be a woman or a man around 3200 BC within a specific community in southern Mesopotamia means inquiring into how different groups of people expressed who they were in their daily lives. To the extent that performances of identity involved the use of artifacts (like carved seals), features, and elements of the physical environment, these views are accessible to archaeologists. Needless to say, it is not so much the objects themselves that convey this information as it is their relations revealed in their contexts of discovery. On a larger scale, how these self-conceptions arose requires careful analysis of the complex histories of individual cultures and their variably well-integrated components. Histories, then, are unique, unlikely to have been replicated in other times and places.

Communication Across Theoretical Schools As outlined above, views on southern Mesopotamia’s past have changed dramatically since the early nineteenth century. In the course of research conducted since that time methods along with concepts of culture, history, and

Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia  261

the relation of material remains to both have been debated. So has the role of southern Mesopotamia in understanding the human past. In the process, data have been collected by people operating under different sets of guiding principles. We conclude this section by considering how these findings are related to each other and the theories under which they were gathered. It is common to treat different theories as mutually exclusive, with their practitioners engaged in intellectual debates that cannot be reconciled. There is no doubt that each of the perspectives considered here is based on very different premises that specify why people act the way they do. An important point to bear in mind, however, is that the data generated by researchers working within different conceptual frameworks are used by those conducting investigations following other guiding principles. The results of culture historical studies define the chronological framework employed by all archaeologists working in southern Mesopotamia to arrange the materials they find in a temporal order. Similarly, information processualists gather about human–environment relations in the area are fundamental to all investigations just as insights from Marxian and interpretivist analyses inform research conducted by supporters of other theories. For example, insights into the operation of large oikoi provided by researchers like Diakonoff are incorporated into Pollock’s account of gender. Notions of clientage, slavery, and exploitation are crucial to her analysis even if she does not see in them the operation of those universal forces that Diakonoff perceives. It is also the case, as noted throughout the chapter, that methods developed by members of one school are readily appropriated by researchers from another. For example, the principles of stratigraphy elaborated by culture historians are essential to processual research, just as settlement pattern studies developed to address processual concerns are widely used by their interpretivist and Marxian colleagues. These crossovers of method and insight imply that theory does not absolutely determine what you see and how you interpret what you find. If this were the case, then communication among supporters of different conceptual structures would be nearly impossible. Yet people subscribing to distinct theories are capable of incorporating results generated under other guiding principles into their own investigations. They can also adapt to their own uses methods developed within alternative perspectives. What does this say about the relationship between theory and data? There is little doubt that the conceptual framework within which someone works directs attention to some aspects of ancient reality while discouraging the appreciation of others. Pollock sees evidence of women’s subjugation to men within Mesopotamian realms in data that had long been available. Similar conclusions had not been drawn, or at least not emphasized, by others who were more concerned with issues of class, adaptation, or chronology. Now published, Pollock’s interpretation can be incorporated in the work of all researchers. It can also be said that the sorts of information a researcher generates about the past are very much conditioned by the theoretical

262  Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia

perspective they bring to the investigation. Those data, however, are not so thoroughly shaped by their framing theories that they are unintelligible, and hence useless, to others following very different conceptual paths. People may well argue about the significance of ecological variation, references to slaves in c­ uneiform texts, and how women are represented on seals. They can still accept that such variation, references, and representations exist. It is through communication among practitioners of different theories that the methods used to gather data, and the reconstructions of southern Mesopotamia’s past resulting from their application, have expanded and become more sophisticated. It is easy to lose track of such cross-fertilization in the midst of cross-theoretical debates about how to explain what has come to light. Archaeological knowledge about developments in southern Mesopotamia, as in most world areas, may not advance in clear waves of harmonious agreement. Neither is the field so fragmented among different schools that each yields results that are only useful to a narrow range of scholars.

13 Multiple Views of Stonehenge

In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, written in about 1136, he claimed that Stonehenge was built by Merlin. Around AD 485, the sorcerer magically brought its massive stones from Ireland to help King Ambrosius, a probably mythical early King of the Britons, construct a victory monument. As unlikely as this “history” may seem today, like all history it is based on theoretical positions: about how to calculate the age of a monument; the ways to determine who was King of the Britons; who, indeed, the “Britons” were; who interacted with the Britons; and the nature and responsibilities of kingship. Our previous chapter looked at theory in terms of how different schools of thought approached social and political change in southern Mesopotamia. Here we switch focus to see how one particular site, Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in southern Britain (Figure 13.1), has been interpreted by different parties—although we’ll leave Geoffrey’s ideas for you to evaluate. As in Chapter 12, we will review how practitioners of various archaeological schools have understood much the same set of archaeological remains from different perspectives, emphasizing in particular the work of culture historians, processualists, and interpretivists. Marxian takes on Stonehenge have not been common and are left out here to make room for a discussion of Stonehenge’s place in debates that involve non-­ archaeologists. People outside our profession often have stakes in understanding the past. Stonehenge offers a particularly clear example of how archaeological interests in antiquity crosscut the views and concerns of others and often exist uncomfortably with them. At the end of the chapter, we reserve a few pages for a brief consideration of this topic and its relation to broader issues of theory.

Stonehenge Today Stonehenge’s massive blocks can be seen for several miles across the rolling terrain of Salisbury Plain, about 129 km (80 miles) west of London. The site

264  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

Figure 13.1  Map of southern Britain showing the location of Stonehenge.

is best known for its large, shaped upright sarsen stones, some of which still support lintels of the same material. In fact, Stonehenge is composed of a complex array of nested circular constructions, fashioned in a variety of ways, that were put in place over a long span of time (2950–1700 BC; Figure 13.2). Let us begin with the stone part of the monument. The outermost stone circle is composed of 30 surviving squared uprights made of a very hard kind of sandstone known as “sarsen.” These are laid out to form a circle measuring about 30.5 m in diameter, each sarsen stone separated by approximately 1.1 m. Stone lintels once spanned these gaps, originally creating a continuous circle sitting about 4.9 m above today’s ground surface. At present the entire south and southwest portions of the circle are missing and only three lintels remain in place. The lintels are joined to each other and their supporting upright using techniques that are more at home in carpentry than masonry. One member of each pair of lintels has a vertical groove at one end into which the projecting tongue of its neighbor fits. The top of the supporting sarsen is outfitted with two low knobs of stone, each of which corresponds to a cup-shaped depression in the base of the corresponding lintel. The lintels are fitted over these projections and joined to each other, increasing the stability of the entire construction.

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  265

Figure 13.2  M  ap of Stonehenge showing the major features discussed in the text. The Aubrey Holes are arranged around the inner perimeter of the ditch and bank. Drawn after Figure 4 in Burl, A. (2007) Stonehenge: A Complete History and Archaeology of the World’s Most Enigmatic Stone Circle. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers.

Set within this outer ring is a circular arrangement of bluestones that are about 2 m high and now lack lintels. They form a ring measuring 23 m across. Just six remain in their original upright positions, but they may once have numbered as many as 60. Within the circle of blue stones is a ­horseshoe-shaped arrangement of upright sarsens that opens to the northeast. This configuration measures 13.7 m across and is composed of five free-­ standing units each composed of three stones—two vertical slabs supporting a lintel. These “trilithons” (triple stones) stand 6.1 to 7.3 m high and are held in place using the same form of attachments described for the outer sarsen circle. This arrangement, in turn, contains another circle of bluestones, also open to the northeast. These slabs are 1.8–2.4 m high and do not support lintels. Lying towards the base (southwest) side of the horseshoe of blue stones is a massive gray-green sandstone slab that is 4.9 m long. It currently lies flat and has been dubbed the “Altar Stone.” Most likely, it originally stood vertically and was not used as an altar.

266  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

Stonehenge is not limited to constructions made of rock. In fact, the “henge” part of its name refers to a ditch-and-bank arrangement found in many of the United Kingdom and Ireland’s monumental sites. Around the stones is a ditch dug into the underlying chalk; it is 101 m across, about as wide as a modern football field. This circular dry moat has banks on its inner and outer margins that are composed of chalk dug from the ditch; the banks were then covered with earth. An opening in the bank-and-ditch at the northeast lines up with the opening in the innermost sarsen and bluestone horseshoes. This gap also matches up with a formal walkway called an avenue. Like the circular ditch, the avenue is bordered on the northwest and southeast by ditches with low earthen banks. This avenue is 21.3 m wide and continues to the northeast past the modern highway. Eventually it reaches the Avon River. Located near the center of this walkway, just outside the ditch, is the large rock known as the heel stone. This sarsen is 4.9 m high and was shaped by nature, not human activity. A second, narrower, entrance through the encircling bank and ditch lies on the south, but does not seem to have been marked by stones or to have connected to a formal avenue. Two isolated sarsen stones are found within the bank; one is on the northwest and the other on the southeast sides of this circular chalk-and-earth construction. Each of these so-called Station Stones may have been paired with other comparable blocks, although any possible companions have disappeared. The “Slaughter Stone,” another block of sarsen, currently lies flat on the east edge of the gap in the ditch-and-bank. At varying distances from Stonehenge within and around Salisbury Plain are large earthen mounds, or barrows, that largely pre and post-date Stonehenge’s creation. These constructions take many shapes but seem to have functioned primarily as tombs. This describes what visitors to Stonehenge see today and have for quite a while. Vandalism and some stone robbing have taken their toll over the past three millennia or so, but Stonehenge has generally been undisturbed by developers. Until recently the site was not much fought over as property, but its intellectual significance and place in national history have been much contested.

Antiquaries and Stonehenge Stonehenge was visited numerous times since it abandonment around 1600 BC, but records of what these visitors thought of the place do not appear until the Middle Ages. From that time through the nineteenth century there were numerous attempts to grasp Stonehenge’s significance within British history, some more systematic than others. These efforts occasionally involved investigations conducted at the site. As was the case for early studies of Mesopotamian prehistory, however, the emphasis was not on establishing what happened at a certain location and when it occurred. Early investigators

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  267

did not use careful studies of materials recovered in well-recorded contexts. Rather, attempts were made to tie the massive stone-and-earth constructions of Stonehenge to individuals and cultural groups mentioned in known documents. The Bible was of less concern here than it was in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates. With several notable exceptions, research at Stonehenge was guided not by a search for the roots of Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage, but for indications of how British history fit within Europe’s past. Classical authors, such as Julius Caesar, were used as sources to place the monument in history as it was understood at the time. Stonehenge’s unusual size and form made it a tempting target for such analyses. Early researchers thought that if it could be related to constructions recorded elsewhere on the continent, then important insights into Britain’s early history would be revealed. Much of this debate centered on the role that the Romans played from AD 43–410 in shaping Britain when that land was part of their empire. Rome was generally seen in these early times as a civilizing force. Romans changed conquered barbarians, such as the Britons, into people who respected and perpetuated forms of social organization that could be called “government.” In contrast to supposedly unorganized barbarians, ­Roman-style rule would guarantee order and restrain base human impulses. The mythical King Ambrosius, for example, was seen as the inheritor of Roman civilization, ruling after the Romans left, as was the probably equally mythical King Arthur. Inigo Jones (see Box 13.1), in the seventeenth century, conducted one of the first detailed surveys of Stonehenge. His model of architecture was derived from the Romans, and his map of Stonehenge matches his ideas. For Jones, Stonehenge was a simple and imperfect version of far more elaborate imperial Roman constructions. Nevertheless, he thought the arrangement of its parts was inspired by principles of Roman architecture. On the one Box 13.1  Inigo Jones Inigo Jones was an architect of some note in England during the early seventeenth century. His studies in Italy provided him with the skills and inspiration to bring elements of Italianate Renaissance architecture to England. Some of Jones’s grandest constructions for the English aristocracy and the royal court still stand, including the Banqueting Hall at the Palace of Whitehall, the Queen’s House in Greenwich, and Covent Garden Square in London. He also worked in stage design and served under King Charles I as Surveyor of Works. It was in this last capacity that Jones turned his architectural skills to making the first formal map of Stonehenge.

268  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

hand, Jones’s work demonstrates a feature of archaeological research we have discussed before: he used field data (his map of Stonehenge) to evaluate an idea about past human relationships. On the other, it also demonstrates one of the weaknesses of conducting investigations based on deeply cherished worldviews. His map was intentionally or unintentionally drawn to yield the results he expected to see. Even some of his contemporaries recognized that Jones’s diagram was inaccurate and did not prove what he claimed. Despite problems with these interpretations, Romans, and occasionally Greeks, continued to be championed for many years to come as ­Stonehenge’s builders. The enduring appeal of such claims was often rooted in the great skill and engineering knowledge needed to fashion the constructions at Stonehenge. Many thought that the crude and rude “savages” the ­Romans ­encountered could not possibly have known how to move, shape, and set in place the materials used in the monument. In a worldview that saw clear differences between civilized people and barbarian savages, the native Britons were definitely not civilized. Stonehenge could not therefore be a product of local hands. From the beginning of investigations at Stonehenge, however, there was an alternative view that promoted native Druids as Stonehenge’s creators. Early antiquaries (people who collected old artifacts and natural objects, for example, fossils), such as John Aubrey and William Stukeley (see Boxes 13.2 and 13.3), championed this view and gathered field evidence to support their claims. They initiated systematic surveys of Stonehenge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, creating maps that were remarkably accurate, especially given the available technology. Part of what drove this work Box 13.2  John Aubrey John Aubrey was a member of the landed gentry in England during the seventeenth century. Though suffering from debts throughout his life, Aubrey managed to live a relatively leisured, if peripatetic, life as he travelled among the houses of his more financially solvent friends. He used these connections to write copiously, if not always with great accuracy, about the people he came to know. The resulting anecdotes were collected in a manuscript entitled “Brief Lives.” Though not published, these short accounts served as the bases of biographies written about Aubrey’s subjects by others, especially Anthony Woods. Aubrey’s wide-ranging fascination with the world around him extended to the study of Britain’s past. This interest led him to conduct surveys in search of ancient monuments. In the course of one such study he came upon the large Neolithic stone circle at Avebury in southern England. It was also in the course of this work that Aubrey recorded Stonehenge.

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  269 Box 13.3  William Stukeley William Stukeley studied medicine in early eighteenth-century England, went on to become a vicar at All Saints’ Church in Stamford, and to write a memoir of his friend Sir Isaac Newton. He is perhaps best remembered for the investigations he conducted at the Neolithic stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge in southern England and which he reported in publications that appeared in 1740 and 1743. These studies comprise the earliest systematic research carried out at both monuments and they set the stage for later archaeological investigations at the sites. Stukeley’s fascination with the religion of the Druids led him to mistakenly associate Stonehenge and Avebury with that religious sect. This interpretation dominated understandings of British Neolithic stone circles generally and Stonehenge in particular into the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the claims made on Stonehenge by neo-Druids today owe a great deal to Stukeley.

was a desire to identify the source of inspiration for Stonehenge by providing a map of its overall shape, and a detailed account of the site’s architecture. Just as Inigo Jones looked for Roman inspiration in the forms and relations among the stones, so men like Aubrey and Stukeley looked to other groups. They used their data to refute claims about Romans, or Phoenicians or Egyptians, trying to link the site to what they saw as its true source: Druids and/or Celts. The maps that emerged from this work exposed Jones’s errors. Further, these diagrams provided a firmer basis than existed before for comparing Stonehenge with stone circles known from elsewhere in the British Isles. Though some of these monuments covered larger areas than Stonehenge, none were as complex in their arrangement as the example found on Salisbury Plain. Despite their differences, all these sites shared basic similarities of form. It was very likely therefore that Stonehenge was part of a broad tradition of stone circle construction that was native to Britain and unrelated to architecture originating with groups living along the Mediterranean’s shores. That most of these numerous circles were found in areas never subdued by Romans ­supported the indigenous origin of Stonehenge. But why were Druids identified as the creators of these monuments? In answering that question we have to bear in mind two points about the conceptual structure in which the British antiquaries worked. First, they took for granted the Biblically based chronology of the world which specified that the earth was no more than 6,000 years old. Thus, all sites had to fit within a very short span of time. Second, successful interpretation of stone circles and other remains meant associating them with, preferably, some group of named people who dominated this brief history. Since for them the human presence on earth

270  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

was short and fairly well known from written accounts, it only made sense that all sites must have been creations of those groups whose names scholars already knew. If the Romans were not Stonehenge’s creators, then some of the people they mentioned upon their arrival in Britain might be. Roman writers such as Tacitus described the Druids as religious leaders among the Britons who often incited resistance to Roman arms. Since the antiquaries saw stone circles as places of ancient worship, there was a strong tendency to link Druids to these supposedly sacred locales. There were problems with this interpretation, not the least of which is that there is no mention of stone circles in ­Roman reports of Druidic worship. In fact, most such religious observations were supposed to have been conducted in natural settings, often around venerable oak trees. Though some of these difficulties were recognized at the time, for those who saw Stonehenge as a native construction, the Druids were in the right place at the right time to play the role of its creators. Once again, we see here an uneasy mix of theory and worldview. ­Aubrey and Stukeley in particular set out to gather data with which to answer the question of who built Stonehenge. In the process, they produced results still used by archaeologists today. Once having refuted a Roman origin for the site, however, they did not question received wisdom concerning the antiquity of people in Britain before the Romans’ arrival, or investigate ­a lternatives besides groups named in Roman accounts of Britain’s inhabitants. They exercised the doubt on which scientific investigations are based within narrow limits. It was acceptable to debate who among recorded groups might have built Stonehenge, but not to wonder if the builders belonged to groups who pre-dated these better-known societies. Excavations conducted at Stonehenge and in the surrounding barrows through the early nineteenth century tended to be casual affairs about which little was recorded and less published. Caches of animal remains that were retrieved from the monument, for example, were quickly seen by many as evidence for rituals involving blood sacrifice. Still, as was the case for southern Mesopotamia, these discoveries were not interpreted with reference to their contexts of recovery (which would have been, minimally, their vertical and horizontal relations with other finds). As noted in Chapter 1, archaeology is based on ignorance about the past, ignorance that can only be ­reduced through careful recording of recovered materials in context. Aubrey, Stukeley, their predecessors and contemporaries worked from a position of knowledge. They knew Stonehenge’s date was recent, its builders named, its purpose as a religious center clear. The crucial point was to decide who among the available candidates were responsible for the site as it appeared on Salisbury Plain when it was mapped. Doing any more would have required developing new techniques with which to collect and record the vertical and horizontal contexts of recovered materials. Pursuing those lines of inquiry would have required admitting doubts about the site’s ­dating, use, and origins. It would be as misguided to criticize British antiquaries for their treatment of Stonehenge as it is to dress down early researchers in southern

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  271

Mesopotamia. We all work within conceptual frameworks that highlight certain areas for study while obscuring other lines of inquiry. Early research on Stonehenge, therefore, was characterized by arguments that were rigorous, empirically based, but limited by assumptions of which few, if any, of the participants were consciously aware. Once those assumptions were exposed, the nature of the debate broadened considerably.

Addressing History in Context Recognizing that the question of who built Stonehenge might be more complex than it initially appeared required, first, insights derived from ­research in Salisbury Plain, and second, shifts in general archaeological theory. In the first case, excavations conducted during the early to middle nineteenth century into large burial chambers, or long barrows, overlooking Stonehenge revealed communal interments that lacked grave goods made of iron. They did, however, yield chips of sarsen stone, likely derived from the nearby monument. It seemed reasonable, therefore, that the people interred in these mortuary chambers were alive when the great stone circles were being raised and prior to the period immediately preceding the Roman invasion when iron implements were widely available in southern Britain. Such discoveries did little to support the notion that Stonehenge dated to the last centuries BC. At about the same time, researchers in Scandinavia were developing a scheme for categorizing the many artifacts that were coming to light there and in the rest of Europe. As discussed briefly in Chapter 3, they organized these materials according to whether they were made of stone, bronze, or iron. Though not initially proposed as an evolutionary scheme, this taxonomy was soon treated as one. Increasingly, scholars recognized that through time iron replaced bronze in the making of tools in Europe, bronze, in its turn, having displaced stone. If iron was the dominant metal used during the centuries preceding the Roman incursion into Britain, and if the long barrow burials were contemporary with Stonehenge’s construction, then the absence of iron from the barrows suggested that Stonehenge’s builders were not the Druids described by Tacitus and others. No one could tell at this point how old Stonehenge was. There was a strong possibility, however, that it was the product of a very ancient and unknown culture. Investigators of Stonehenge had arrived at much the same position as had those studying early societies in southern Mesopotamia. In both cases, unexpected evidence pointed to older predecessors of the more recent cultures that had long been the primary foci of study. Shadowy Sumerians gave rise to better known Babylonians and Assyrians, just as an unnamed people were now discerned as ancestral to the much-discussed Druids. Figuring out who was responsible for Mesopotamian civilization and Stonehenge required shaking off dependence on texts and developing techniques that would allow writing history from material remains. It was in this context that the techniques and theory of culture history were born.

272  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

To be sure, changing research strategies in Britain and Mesopotamia were related, often being instigated and practiced by people who worked in both areas. In fact, these culture historical investigations were parts of a broader revolution in archaeological practice that increasingly emphasized: 1) defining ancient cultures by identifying patterned associations among objects with distinct styles; 2) organizing these cultures chronologically by charting changes in their diagnostic styles across stratigraphic sequences revealed in deep excavations; and 3) explaining shifts in those styles by movements of people and/or ideas. Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (see Box 13.4), perhaps the premiere British archaeologist of the late nineteenth century, was among the first to recognize that achieving these aims required that: 1) the excavator be present at all times when field work is being conducted and keep precise records of all that is found, recording contexts of recovery in notes, drawings, and photographs;

Box 13.4  Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers was born in Yorkshire in 1827 and served in the British military from 1841–1882, retiring with the rank of Lieutenant General. Just before leaving the service, in 1880, he inherited the considerable Rivers estate of his great-uncle, adding the name ‘Rivers’ to his own as part of the bequest. Pitt-Rivers had long shown an interest in past material culture and went on to conduct excavations at his estate in Dorset as well as elsewhere in England. Pitt-Rivers’s work was distinguished, especially for the time, by his care in recording finds and their locations as well as by his insistence that archaeological materials be put on display for the education of the public. Pitt-Rivers’s extensive ­archaeological and ethnographic collections of materials eventually found a permanent home at Oxford University where they were installed in an annex of the University Museum. The organization of the displays was designed to illustrate the general principles of cultural evolution as they were understood at that time. Pieces were arranged so as to reflect the presumed progressive changes that material culture underwent as it evolved towards ever greater degrees of complexity, efficiency, and rationality. The Pitt-Rivers museum can still be visited at Oxford University.

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  273

2) no site be completely excavated, since later archaeologists will likely have better techniques to apply to its study; 3) any work should be published, and made available to the public; and 4) the materials recovered should be placed on public display since they were owned by the citizens of the places where these items were discovered. Though these practices seem quite ordinary today, they constituted a break from previous approaches. The recognized importance of context motivated this greater attention to controlled excavation and publication of results. Once it is acknowledged that questions about the past do not depend on matching remains to cultures and individuals mentioned in written accounts, it is imperative that relations among all uncovered materials be described in detail. It is from such carefully uncovered, reported, and analyzed finds that previously unknown cultures can be identified, their distributions mapped, and their temporal relations reconstructed. Most early culture historical work in Britain was not conducted at Stonehenge. As it turns out, the site has a long history, but the sequence of events through which it was created is not neatly laid out in clear stratigraphic levels. Initial culture historical research focused on excavating the burial mounds, or barrows, that are widely dispersed across southern Britain. Painstaking comparison of materials recovered from these interments, as well as from other sites, led to the creation of a chronological sequence marked by changes in a variety of materials. Styles of pottery tended to dominate the trait lists, but scholars also paid attention to the forms of stone and metal tools. Ironically, excavations at Stonehenge did not initially benefit from this attention to context. The investigations immediately following World War I, for example, stripped soil from large portions of the monument and turned up many artifacts. Records of this work were poor, failing to provide sufficient information on context to reconstruct ancient behaviors and infer the site’s chronology. Nonetheless, as the twentieth century progressed, increasingly sophisticated approaches implemented by better funded projects succeeded in piecing together the site’s complex history. It turns out that Stonehenge’s current appearance is the product of a long sequence of events stretching from 2950 to 1700 BC (Figure 13.3). Very briefly, the first major set of activities involved making the henge by digging the encircling ditch and piling up chalk to form its bordering embankments. Roughly contemporary with this major building effort was the digging of 56 holes, each about 1 m in diameter and 1 m deep. Called the Aubrey Holes, they are spaced more-or-less evenly in a circle within the site’s inner bank and may have originally held wooden posts or stone pillars. Additional wooden constructions of uncertain shape seem to have been put up closer to the center of the monument during 2950–2550 BC. Beginning around 2550 BC as many as 80 bluestones were brought to the site and arranged in two concentric rings composed of closely spaced, paired columns. This set of

 

 

 

Figure 13.3  P  lans showing the different phases in Stonehenge’s construction. Drawn after Figures 256 and 257 in Cleal, R. and Allen, M. (1995) Stonehenge in its Landscape. In Stonehenge in its Landscape: Twentieth Century Excavations. Rosamund Cleal and M ­ ichael Allen (eds) pp. 464–491. London: English Heritage.

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  275

stone circles is best preserved on the northeast. It had an interior diameter of 20 m, and was located near the middle of the space defined by the ditch and embankment. The bluestones themselves likely came from the Preseli mountains, 250 km to the west in what is now Wales. By 2400 BC the bluestones had been removed from their original locations and the great sarsen rings were erected. The sarsens derive from quarries roughly 40 km north of Stonehenge. Thirty of them formed an outer circle, each upright linked to its neighbors by a continuous curve of lintels. Contained within this space is the sarsen horseshoe. It is open on the northeast and composed of the 15 sarsens that comprise the five trilithons described earlier. By 2150 BC two constructions employing bluestones were erected: one, a continuous circle of upright slabs set within the sarsen circle; the other an oval arrangement of vertically set bluestones nested within the sarsen horseshoe. Around 1900 BC the northeast portion of the inner bluestone oval was removed, converting it into a horseshoe arrangement along the lines of the sarsens that enclose it. The Station Stones, Heel Stone, and the avenue running from Stonehenge to the Avon River were also introduced during the period from 2550–1900 BC, though the Heel Stone may belong to an earlier point in the sequence. The above account simplifies a complex history in the interests of space. Please refer to some of the sources listed in the Suggested Readings if you want to know more of the details. Stripped down as it is, this outline raises an important point about many archaeological sites. That is, what we see on the surface is often the result of re-buildings and accretions and not the expression of a timeless vision held in the minds of the original builders. Archaeologists deal with static remains that were once parts of dynamic cultures. It is very tempting to treat the arrangement of buildings and features at sites as parts of unchanging configurations that survived from first construction to abandonment. As work at Stonehenge revealed, this is far from the case. Understanding Stonehenge’s place within the prehistory of Salisbury Plain depends on charting its shifting form, and this is only possible through the techniques of culture history. From the late nineteenth century to the present, research based on the principles of culture history has been pursued at Stonehenge and in its environs. Throughout this period techniques of dating, much helped by the advent of Carbon14 analyses, have greatly refined our understanding of Stonehenge’s changing form, just as studies of soils, flora, fauna, and artifacts have enhanced our ability to describe shifts in ancient behaviors and in the surrounding physical environment. All of this work was driven, in part, by that initial question of who raised the monument. Those following the precepts of culture history in the early to middle twentieth century tended to answer that question by referring to processes of diffusion and migration. Once Stonehenge’s pre-Roman date was acknowledged among researchers, the search was on for a culture whose members could have inspired the creation of such a complex, labor-intensive monument. One supposition that

276  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

persisted from earlier debates about Stonehenge’s origins was that native Britons were too “primitive” to have fashioned such an engineering marvel on their own. They surely needed outside help and the most likely place to find that inspiration was in what Europeans long-considered a major hearth of civilization, the Mediterranean basin. About the time that Stonehenge’s origins were being reconsidered, new information on the hierarchically structured, architecturally impressive civilizations of Minoan Crete (2300–1450 BC) and Mycenaean Greece (1600– 1100 BC) was coming to light. The Minoans and Mycenaeans seemed to be likely sources of the engineering knowledge and organizational skills needed to move large stones long distances and arrange them into awe-inspiring monuments that could last for ages. The discovery in the early 1950s of shallow etchings of daggers and axes in a style reminiscent of Mycenaean examples on several of the sarsens at Stonehenge seemed to confirm this view. The scarcity of Mycenaean trade goods in Britain generally, and their complete absence at Stonehenge, was not a major obstacle to accepting the diffusion of architectural knowledge and masonry skills from the Mediterranean to southern Britain. As noted in Chapter 1, theories exercise great power over our imaginations. Culture historians generally stressed the operation of external contacts such as diffusion and migration in explaining cultural transformations. Researchers operating in this school, therefore, were strongly predisposed to look outside Britain for the roots of something as locally unusual as Stonehenge. Deep-seated and pervasive assumptions about the cultural capacities of native Britons made the civilizations bordering the Mediterranean appear as the likely home of those who could inspire the locals to make the monument. A few carvings of Mycenaean design thus assumed great interpretive significance. Given these assumptions, Stonehenge must have been built by Britons under the tutelage of foreigners. This diffusionist view was undermined by the application of newly developed methods of Carbon14 dating to remains from Stonehenge and other comparable sites in Western Europe. Radiocarbon dating placed the origins of Stonehenge within the British Neolithic (4000–2000 BC) and helped relate its history to those known from other monumental and domestic sites in southern Britain. What had been seen as Stonehenge’s unique features could now be related to local innovations made within a cultural sequence of great time depth. The most economical explanation of Stonehenge’s form was to see it as arising from the efforts of local people operating within their own gradually changing cultures. Contacts with populations in eastern France who raised similar monuments were likely. No longer, however, was it necessary to explain Stonehenge’s creation as a simple and direct consequence of such interactions. These shifts highlight once again how extant theories can give rise to research that disproves them.

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  277

Why was Stonehenge Built? Culture historians did, and continue to, cast much light on who built Stonehenge and how they did it. Through their work, techniques, such as careful stratigraphic analysis, and concepts, including the importance of context, have become central to the conduct of all archaeological studies in Britain and beyond. Similarly, the basic phases defined by culture historical research, each marked by distinctive artifact styles, continue to be used by scholars of all theoretical persuasions to divide the continuum of time into distinct ­periods. Diffusion may now be less heavily relied on to explain culture change than it was in the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, much attention still centers on reconstructing when sites were occupied, with which other settlements they were associated, and how the resulting settlement system changed over time. That said, developments in archaeological theory throughout the late twentieth century had impacts on how Stonehenge was viewed. The advent of processualism in particular led to an emphasis on a new set of questions concerning why this massive monument was built. The traditional view, regardless of who was thought to have raised the stones, was that Stonehenge was a center of religious devotion. The size of the place and the way in which it dwarfed human visitors seemed in keeping with a religious center where puny mortals confronted powerful supernatural forces. That general position has not been seriously questioned in recent years. By the mid-­t wentieth century, however, it became increasingly important to know how those ­devotions fit within the overarching cultural system centered on Stonehenge. Explaining the center’s size, form, location, and history depended on identifying the functions it served within the cultures that created it. Several different approaches to addressing Stonehenge’s function were pursued by scholars. The perspective with the greatest appeal outside archaeology stressed Stonehenge’s function as an observatory used to track celestial events important in the daily lives of early farmers and herders. The two most significant of these occurrences are the rising of the sun at the summer solstice and its setting on the winter solstice (around June 21 and December 21, respectively, in the northern hemisphere). These dates mark crucial points in the yearly cycle: first when the sun is at its zenith in the north; and second, when hours of daylight there have reached their minimum. Dependent as early farmers and herders were on variations in the sun’s warmth and light for scheduling crucial economic activities, it makes perfect sense that they would organize their years around the above events and be very concerned to predict their occurrences. It had long been known that someone standing near the center of Stonehenge’s trilithon and inner bluestone horseshoes and looking along the alley would be facing a point on the northeast horizon where the sun rises at the summer solstice. Just as importantly, processions marching into the horseshoes would have been walking towards the sunset

278  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

on the winter solstice, perhaps marking that event and conducting ceremonies to ensure the sun’s return. These observations were refined and further tested by archaeologists and archaeoastronomers (those who study ancient knowledge of the sun, moon, and stars). Such work led to the identification of other possible alignments between pairs of stones and various celestial observations. Lunar eclipses could be calculated using the 56 Aubrey holes, while sunrises at the Fall and Spring equinoxes (when daylight and darkness are about equal) were supposedly determined using combinations of sightlines from the Station Stones and a hole by the Heel Stone. There were problems with many of these interpretations, not the least of which were the almost endless possible alignments one could generate among the constructed features at Stonehenge, a great many of which could be linked to a variety of solar and lunar events. Nonetheless, the idea that Stonehenge functioned as a celestial calculator gained considerable popularity and was offered as an explanation for its construction. The notion that its features were arranged to predict where the sun will rise at the summer solstice and set at the winter solstice is still generally accepted and is included in most accounts of Stonehenge’s use throughout much of its history. To be sure, many of those who proposed that Stonehenge functioned to predict the movement of the sun and moon were not processualists. One of the most widely read of these proponents, Gerald Hawkins (see Box 13.5),

Box 13.5  Gerald Hawkins Gerald Hawkins was an astronomer with a long-standing interest in the ways in which ancient people arranged monumental constructions, such as Stonehenge, to track and predict the movements of celestial bodies. He also examined the form and arrangement of such large features as the Nasca lines in southern Peru and the Amun temple in Egypt for evidence that they, too, were built to conform with astronomical observations. One of Hawkins’s innovations was to use a computer to compare alignments among features at Stonehenge with the reconstructed positions of the sun, moon, and certain stars in the sky above Salisbury Plain at the time of the monument’s construction and use. Though much criticized by archaeologists at the time, Hawkins’s views on the astronomical alignments seen at Stonehenge quickly gained wide acceptance in the popular literature dealing with that site. From their first publication in the 1960s to this day, his argument that the monument was an observatory has figured to varying degrees in many interpretations of Stonehenge, proposed by professionals and amateurs alike.

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  279

was an astronomer. Still, explaining Stonehenge’s form by reference to its presumed function (as an observatory) fits well with processual approaches that tend to equate the reasons for a phenomenon’s existence with its adaptive purpose. Farmers and herders could employ Stonehenge to predict seasonal changes, the knowledge of which was important to their survival. The question still remained, however, as to why so much effort was devoted to creating a setting for observing the sky. A few well-placed sticks coupled with years of careful observations could have accomplished the same purpose. What goal was achieved by making Stonehenge so large? One answer offered from a processualist stance turned on issues of power. Many processualists viewed changes in power relations as ranged along an evolutionary sequence from small-scale egalitarian societies to hierarchically structured, populous states. Occupying an intermediate position in this supposed universal progression were chiefdoms. Chiefdoms, societies of moderate sizes whose populations are usually measured in the thousands, are organized according to a rudimentary ranking system with a few elites leading many followers. The latter retain considerable control over their own lives, thus limiting the power of their leaders. Two of the principal ways chiefdoms are recognized archaeologically are by the sizes of the constructions their members were able to raise, and marked differences in the lavishness of their burials. The first criterion speaks to the ability of leaders to harness large labor forces in the accomplishment of significant projects. The second reflects variations in wealth thought to correlate with ranked distinctions between rulers and ruled. The nature of chiefdoms was much debated by processualists. Colin Renfrew (see Box 13.6), for example, noted that there was a tendency to treat chiefdoms as organized under the leadership of charismatic individuals who stood out from all others by the relative opulence of their material possessions and the respect they were accorded. This model did not match with the evidence from places like Stonehenge. The burials found within Stonehenge’s encircling Box 13.6  Colin Renfrew Colin Renfrew is, and has been since at least the late 1970s, a major figure in the archaeology of Europe. He has written broadly on such topics as Aegean prehistory, the spread of Indo-European languages, and the socio-political significance of megalithic monuments. Renfrew was one of the first researchers to synthesize results from the Carbon14 dating of European and Near Eastern materials. He used these findings to question the traditional diffusionist view that such basic cultural features as agriculture, herding, and monument construction first developed in the Near East and spread westward into Europe. This shift in viewpoints

280  Multiple Views of Stonehenge was influential in turning the attention of archaeologists to local factors in explaining processes of culture change throughout Europe rather than relying on external influences to account for these transformations. Renfrew initially adopted key facets of the processualist approach in phrasing his own accounts of the past. He insisted, however, that the adaptationist and local foci of this perspective had to be balanced with an appreciation for inter-societal interactions in shaping culture change. The latter aspect of his work is most systematically expressed in his theory of peer-polity interactions. Peer-polity interaction stresses that shifts towards increasing socio-political complexity are rarely accomplished by the members of individual societies acting alone. Instead, these developments often involve intense cultural, social, political, and economic interactions among neighboring political units which together form a system of closely interrelated, mutually inter-influencing, often quite competitive parts. Unlike world systems theory, peer-polity interaction deals with inter-societal transactions that took place over relatively short distances among societies that were roughly equivalent in their sizes and levels of complexity. Renfrew remains influential throughout archaeology, his intellectual reach extending well beyond Europe and processualism.

bank are largely simple cremations with few clear grave goods. There are rich interments in some of the round barrows surrounding the monument, but these post-date Stonehenge’s main period of use. In short, Renfrew noted a contradiction that applied to Stonehenge and some other European cases where people also raised large stone monuments during the third millennium BC. That is, the amount of work involved in building such centers was considerable, but there was no sign of the chiefs who supposedly directed these efforts. This led Renfrew to argue that power in chiefdoms could also be exercised through corporate bodies, or groups of people who cooperate in accomplishing a set of activities. Leadership in corporate settings is provided by elites who work together in directing the actions of their subordinates. These notables may not stand out by their dress or other possessions in daily life, and are not overtly celebrated at death. Still, by working together they can motivate people to great exertions in the name of the group. Stonehenge, therefore, functioned as an expression of this collective power. Stonehenge’s great size could thus be seen as a tangible statement of social unity and the political structure that made that unity possible. This and other easily visible monuments may also have been used by their builders to stake clear claims to land. For populations whose members were dispersed across

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  281

the landscape in small settlements—as was then thought to have been the case for the late Neolithic people who constructed Stonehenge—this may have been critically important. Such dispersal would have promoted social fissioning as different residential groups could easily lose touch with each other. Having a massive center to which members of the wider group returned on a regular basis during the year helped solidify bonds that weakened during periods of absence. Along the same lines, ceremonies conducted at places like Stonehenge revivified feelings of commitment to each other, the land, their leaders, and whatever supernatural powers governed society and nature. Stonehenge, and other large stone monuments, might thus have functioned as religious centers in which rituals were tied to movements of the sun and moon. Their size and form, however, went beyond these obvious functions and reflected their roles as focal points for organizing large, dispersed populations under the leadership of councils. Stonehenge was less a means for conducting celestial observations than a medium for ensuring social continuity and solidarity. It was on such unity that the survival of the entire culture depended. The above views parallel processualist approaches to explaining the emergence of the state in southern Mesopotamia in several ways: 1) The society is the basic unit of action, adaptation, and analysis. 2) Emphasis is placed on how ancient people maintained the integrity of that unit. 3) Power differences play crucial roles in ensuring such solidarity by providing direction to large groups of people. 4) Material culture was central to the activities by which unity was achieved and preserved. Consequently, once Stonehenge’s function within the cultural system of those who built it was identified, its existence had been explained.

Creating Culture through Experiences of the Material In keeping with the general tone of interpretive approaches to the past, perspectives on Stonehenge founded on the premises of this school are quite diverse. They are united by a general desire to move away from a search for supposed universal processes that animated past behaviors. Instead, interpretivists seek to identify the meanings that all elements of material culture, including monuments, had for those who made and used them. In this view, processualist explanations of Stonehenge that see it as an expression of social solidarity and the power that ensured such unity are problematic. This is because they rely too heavily on the notion that all cultures are systems that naturally seek balanced relations among their constituent parts. Instead, interpretivists insist that people act for reasons that make sense to them and not

282  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

because they are driven by forces of which they are not aware (such as seeking social equilibrium). Asking why Stonehenge was built and assumed the different forms it took over its long life depends on grasping those culturally specific motivations. There are many ways this can be done, and we will focus here on how two particularly influential researchers, Julian Thomas and Michael Parker Pearson (see Box 13.7), went about this task. In essence, Thomas argues that past people must be understood in their own terms and not by projecting our understandings of life and culture onto them. This emic view is possible in the absence of living informants because the material remains we recover archaeologically were infused with meaning by these ancient people. Studying patterned relations among these surviving objects, their field contexts, can reveal some sense of what those meanings were. Thomas is careful to point out that artifacts are not secondary to thought. Rather, people in general, use objects of all sorts to think about themselves and the world. Without these things we could not live meaningful and coherent lives. But material items do not have inherent meanings. Rather, their significance is culturally determined and historically contingent. That is, what we make of a plate with a certain decoration or a house of a certain form is an outcome of the beliefs, values, and dispositions that are unique to the culture in which we participate, as that culture exists at a certain moment in time. To be sure, cultures are not homogenous entities and people participate

Box 13.7 Julian Thomas and Michael Parker Pearson Julian Thomas and Michael Parker Pearson were two of the directors of the Stonehenge Riverside Project. Though their theoretical positions are not identical, Thomas and Parker Pearson have both challenged culture historical and processual accounts of the European Neolithic and Bronze Age by stressing the importance of grasping the ways in which ancient people experienced the landscapes in which they lived and imbued them with meaning. Rather than seeing constructions, such as Stonehenge, as direct expressions of ancient political and social forms, Thomas, Parker Pearson, and their colleagues on the Riverside Project view them as having played active roles in shaping cultural principles and, through those principles, human behavior. Hence, Stonehenge was less a symbol of chiefly power than an arena in which distinctions between the powerful and powerless, the living and the dead were made real as different people directly, but to varying degrees, engaged with this symbolically rich setting.

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  283

in them to different degrees and in different ways, depending on such factors as gender, age, social class, and ethnicity. Still, these different perspectives exist within a cultural and temporal framework that is unique and lends to them some loose unity. At the very least what we see are different takes on shared cultural themes and emphases. How does Stonehenge fit into this scheme? One way of looking at the monument is that the builders manipulated a variety of materials to think in certain culturally distinct and historically specific ways about the world and peoples’ relations to each other and the cosmos (Figure 13.4).

Figure 13.4  H  ow views of a landscape can change with the erection of a ditch-and-bank construction or stone circle. Drawn after Figure 40 in, Bradley, R. (1998) The Significance of Monuments: On the Shaping of Human Experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. New York: Routledge.

284  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

Just as importantly, once built, Stonehenge became an important part of that world. Experiences with the monument inspired feelings and dispositions that were essential to the cultures of those who created and used the site. Stonehenge in its changing forms was a product of a sequence of culture, as well as a means for recreating their core principles generation after generation. Explaining Stonehenge’s existence and appearance depends on figuring out how it fit within the matrix of beliefs and values that characterized the cultures of those who used it for more than a thousand years. What can we discern of this meaningful structure? Stonehenge during its final phase, when the stones we see today were in place, is characterized by a complex arrangement of features. Entering the innermost part of the stone circles required passing through a series of barriers. Further, the way the stones and bank are set up means that different parts of the center were capable of hosting groups of varying sizes. Hence, only a few people could be accommodated within the central horseshoe of bluestones, more could have clustered in the area between the encircling bank and outer sarsen circle, while still more could have found spaces to stand outside the ditch. These gathering areas correlate with variations in the abilities of ancient people to experience what was happening within Stonehenge through all of their senses. Those stranded beyond the ditch may have had only a vague sense of what was being said and done within the inner sanctum even as the noise, actions, and smells of this crowd created their own distractions. Individuals in the intermediate position between the sarsen circle and bank would have been better able to see, hear, and smell (e.g., if incense was used) what was happening around the Altar Stone, but were still excluded from participation in those ceremonies. The way Stonehenge was built, therefore, constantly re-created differences within the society. People experienced the monument in a variety of ways that made concrete those differences. Every time individuals attended ceremonies here they were reminded of their varying relations to each other, and presumably to whatever supernatural powers were propitiated at the monument’s center. These distinctions may well have correlated with power differentials, from those of higher rank who conducted the rites to those of lower status standing outside the bank and ditch. The point, however, is that Stonehenge was not constructed to reflect these political distinctions; it did not exist apart from them, as processualists argued. Power and social difference were not abstract principles represented by physical symbols. They were directly experienced by all who variably participated in ceremonies conducted at the monument. Stonehenge was an important symbolic arena in which cultural principles came alive in performance. Changes in the arrangement of stones and other features at Stonehenge were integral parts of shifts in how people related to each other and the supernatural. Without the monument, the cultures of its builders would not have existed in the forms they took. Thomas’s perspective combines performance theory with aspects of what is called phenomenology, that is, how people physically experience the world. There is more to both

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  285

perspectives than we indicate here, of course, and we have noted resources in Suggested Readings for you to pursue if you are interested in learning more about them. Phenomenology looks at experience at a micro-level: a single person. Performance can be thought of as acting at multiple scales from individuals to large groups. But delving further into Stonehenge’s meaning requires examining it at larger scales. For Stonehenge, this means looking at the entirety of Salisbury Plain. This perspective is called landscape archaeology. The study of landscapes began in the cultural historical school, and continued in the work of processualists who devoted most of their attention to how humans interacted with the environment. In these views, the physical aspects of a place’s setting were the most significant. For example, processualists often wanted to know where was a site located with respect to crucial resources, and how were these materials exploited. An interpretivist approach, however, looks at meaning rather than resources and adaptation. To get ourselves into this perspective, we would like to take you on a walk. Aubrey Burl, a contemporary expert on Stonehenge and similar monuments, suggests that a trek following a 3-km-path from the site of Durrington Walls to Stonehenge gives the walker a sense of how prehistoric residents might have experienced the sites. This, too is an aspect of the past privileged by phenomenology. One of the first things to notice is the barrows mentioned above. Then, moving from Durrington Walls, we walk to the southwest. The path contributes to an optical illusion: that we are walking over a large, low, artificial mound. This was first suggested by Stukeley, but recent excavations have shown that the rise is natural. Passing by and through a number of barrows, the Old and New Kings groups (named this, but not containing the burials of kings), we go by or over another monument known as the Cursus. From this point, the land rises again, and we see the sarsen stones of the henge and its Heel Stone. If the we align ourselves with the Heel Stone and the center of the circle, we just need to walk straight ahead towards the worn banks of the avenue, which was once flanked by rows of standing stones, and then a bit further to the monument itself. Burl and others think that the avenue existed to channel processions to Stonehenge proper. What Burl calls the “enchantment” of the walk is spoiled today by fencing, a parking lot, and a highway. In prehistoric times, the experience of Stonehenge would have been unmarred. Of course, what is seen in the early twenty-first century on this walk may not have been what ancient people saw, and what we feel is likely not what they felt. Still, by experiencing a site directly, as in our walk, we can get a sense of the grandeur of some places, the peace of others, and the cleverness of the designers and builders as they reworked the henge and its surroundings. The burial mounds around Stonehenge have long been known. Many of them predate Stonehenge and were already ancient by 3000 BC. Researchers

286  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

have also realized for some time that the monument itself contains cremated human remains. Building Stonehenge in the midst of these mortuary constructions was likely part of a purposeful attempt to evoke a connection to the ancient dead by means of the ceremonies conducted at the center. Those interred at the site may have been among the honored deceased. Bodies, stones, earth, and site-lines to long barrows might have been manipulated to think about ancestors, the supernatural, and to root both in great antiquity. Recent research in Stonehenge’s immediate environs elaborates on this view (Figure 13.5). In particular, Durrington Walls, about 3 km from

Figure 13.5  R  elations among different constructed and perceived features of Salisbury Plain’s landscape. Drawn after Figure 51 in Pitts, M. (2001) Hengeworld. London: Arrow Books, a division of Random House. Originally appeared in Parker Pearson, M. and Ramilisonina (1998) “Stonehenge for the Ancestors: The Stones Pass on the Message.” Antiquity 72: 308–326.

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  287

Stonehenge, turns out to have been a sizable settlement contemporary with at least the monument’s final phase of major construction. Associated with Durrington Walls are two circular arrangements of large wooden posts. Durrington Walls and its “woodhenges” are linked to the Avon River by a formal avenue, as is Stonehenge. Based on these findings and ethnographic analogies, Parker Pearson argues that the occupants of Salisbury Plain in the last half of the third millennium BC used different materials (stone and wood among them) to create a landscape in which they could directly experience abstract distinctions between life and death as these were understood by members of that culture. Durrington Walls, in this view, is the land of the living, its posts made from living trees that showed the signs of decay associated with life cycles. Stonehenge, at least by 2400 BC, was a place of the ancestors, its seemingly unchanging stones imperturbable and permanent. Movement along the avenues and the Avon River from Durrington Walls to Stonehenge—our walk outlined above—was a journey from the world of the living to the world of the dead. This interpretation argues that movement across the Salisbury landscape would have been a powerful way of experiencing relations between the ancestors and their descendants, culminating, presumably, in ceremonies conducted at Stonehenge timed to the summer and winter solstices and the equinoxes. Answering the question of why Stonehenge was remodeled as it was in 2400 BC thus requires two mental activities: inferring the cultural context in which it was created; and grasping how people living within that context used different materials to invoke and encounter physically, in the process of various bodily experiences, meanings that were central to their existence. The material patterns relevant to this attempt exist at varying scales, from the specific arrangements of stones and ditches at Stonehenge to the relation of that site to the natural and created environment of Salisbury Plain. Thomas and Parker Pearson are concerned to point out that this was not a static symbolic structure. Stonehenge itself was modified considerably throughout its long history, its radically different forms likely conveying and instilling very different structures of meaning. The landscape in which the monument was situated also changed. For example, where Stonehenge’s ­avenue intersects the Avon River there was once a circle of bluestones, nicknamed Stonehenge’s “Little Sister.” These uprights were removed and may have been reset at the larger site. Such shifts imply that not only do site forms change, but these transformations can be instrumental in instigating novel views of the world and peoples’ places in it. Thus Salisbury Plain was likely a contested landscape in which objects were redeployed as different factions gained the ability to express themselves materially.

Continuing Contests for Stonehenge Disputes over Stonehenge and its meanings are not limited to those that occurred in the third millennium BC. Unlike most of the sites we discuss

288  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

in the book, this center continues to exercise a considerable effect on the human imagination. In fact, we would guess that many people in the Western world, if asked to name an archaeological site, would respond with “Stonehenge.” Such widespread recognition does not translate into unanimous opinions on what the site means today and how it should be protected. In a sense, arguments over Stonehenge’s significance and future are notably prominent examples of debates that involve a host of sites in many parts of the world. They tend to pit people with very different views of past remains against each other. These include, but are not limited to: private land owners who want a free hand in developing their property; national governments who claim elements of the past that they see as icons of the country and its history; tourists who want to maximize their chance to experience ancient remains as directly as possible; people with perceived stakes in a site due to religious or other cultural concerns; and archaeologists who are interested in pursuing research questions at particular sites. The central point this debate raises for our purposes is, to put it crudely, “Who owns the past?” That query presupposes a notion of possession that derives its significance from the capitalist mode of production. In this structure, the past becomes property that can be owned by staking claims to its tangible surviving remains. As with all forms of property, its owners reserve the right to determine what is done with their possessions. In this case, whoever owns Stonehenge can define its meaning. We can debate the appropriateness of this view. For the moment, as Marxians would be keen to tell us, capitalism defines the parameters for all discussions of Stonehenge. Pursuing the issue of who owns the past takes us into a complex situation wherein conceptual schemes of different sorts intersect, often uncomfortably, at a specific moment in time. On the one hand, legal principles that have been articulated in many countries over the past century contend that a nation has the right to hold particularly valuable sites in common for the good of the country. Thus, Stonehenge, which was in private hands, passed to government control in 1918. State interest in the land was underwritten by a novel legal premise that prioritized national interest over the rights of property owners. The Ancient Monuments Act, first passed in a weak form in 1882 and given greater powers to take control of sites in 1913, was one manifestation of this change in British legal principles. Similar arrangements are now found in many parts of the world as seen, for example, in U.S. government control over such icons of US history as the Yorktown battlefield and Statue of Liberty. At the same time, clauses in many constitutions that guarantee freedom of religion have been used to question absolute national sovereignty over archaeological sites. Thus, groups like the Ancient Order of Druids, recognized in Britain as practicing a legitimate religion, see Stonehenge as a sacred site linked for millennia with their faith. Consequently, they argue that full

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  289

expression of their religion requires that they have access to Stonehenge at crucial points in their ceremonial calendar (the winter and summer solstices, in particular). Interestingly, these claims are founded in part on a mix of archaeological interpretations concerning who built Stonehenge and what it was used for. That some of these views, such as the association of Stonehenge with the Druids, are no longer accepted in the profession has done little to damage ties between it and latter-day Druids. Further afield, various people in the last several decades have built replicas of Stonehenge from such diverse materials as cars (near Alliance, ­Nebraska) and refrigerators (outside Santa Fe, New Mexico and Gordonton, New Zealand). Construction of these monumental replicas of the Salisbury Plain prototype was apparently inspired by diverse motivations including: a desire to honor a deceased loved one (carhenge); an aesthetic impulse; and the pure fun of creating something incongruous. These variably exact replicas of Stonehenge are generally not seen as foci of religious devotion, though some people do time their visits to carhenge and ­f ridgehenges to coincide with the solstices. What they signify, in part, is the widespread appeal of Stonehenge as a powerful symbol of human antiquity and accomplishment. Archaeologists’ claims to Stonehenge are, in turn, founded in part on their ability to clarify its significance to ancient populations through the application of specialized knowledge including an array of investigative techniques. For these reasons, some archaeologists cast themselves as arbiters among different interest groups based on our empirically founded understandings of Stonehenge’s past. This last contention derives, to a significant degree, from the assumption that data-based appreciations of the monument and approaches to its treatment are more valid than views arrived at through religious faith and bureaucratic procedures. Needless to say, this position is not shared by those whose worldviews and powers we challenge. Stonehenge is therefore not merely a nexus of different interpretations offered by proponents of varied archaeological schools. It is also competed over by people from varied backgrounds and with distinct interests who measure their arguments based on very different criteria of law, faith, academic credentials, aesthetics, and data. Attempts to negotiate among parties operating from such disparate backgrounds tend to generate some uncertainty concerning the best ways to deal with Stonehenge. Hence, national policies concerning the site and its setting have oscillated over recent years between providing open access to the monument to closing down direct contact with it almost completely. Similarly, some archaeologists have argued for the absolute prominence of their views while others in the profession have countered that we should be open to, and take seriously, such “alternative histories” as those offered by the neo-Druids. We raise these points for two purposes. First, it is easy to think that archaeological debates occur, and have their consequences, primarily within

290  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

our field. On the contrary, what we have to say about the past is conditioned by events occurring within the societies in which we were raised and continue to work. Further, our interpretations are variably picked up by non-specialists who may adopt some of them while categorically rejecting others. For example, Neo-Druids draw some inspiration from archaeological accounts of solar observations at Stonehenge while denying our ability to tell them that the site was not built by Druids. We exist in a complex world where our research is influenced, though not determined, by the context in which we conduct it, our studies contributing in unanticipated ways to that context. Second, we want you to think about these connections. There is no formula for navigating among the demands of governments, religious congregations, and other interest groups. You have to decide how and to what extent your work will be influenced by the concerns and sensibilities of those with whom you deal outside the profession. It is almost always the best advice to tell any audience what you believe the material you study has to say about important issues, just as it is crucial to lay out your reasons for advancing those interpretations. In this way you stay true to a basic precept that unites just about all archaeologists across theoretical divides, i.e., we owe the people we study as complete and unbiased an account of their lives as we can provide. That said, it is wise to be as aware as possible of how your statements fit into wider discourses on the past, and against what criteria your remarks will be evaluated. This does not mean trying to avoid upsetting some by agreeing with everyone. It does mean acknowledging that people are interested in the past for different reasons and not all of them are founded on the doubts and questions that motivate archaeological research. We can respect neo-­Druidism as a religion even if we do not choose to treat it as good archaeology. The precepts of both are different as are the means by which their members decide what constitutes a proper inference to the best explanation.

Stonehenge and Identity A theme that runs through much of this discussion concerns issues of identity, or the sense one forms of oneself in the context of interacting with others within a specific cultural setting. The identities we enact are based on constructs available to us within our culture and operate at variable levels, from those unique to specific individuals to affiliations we share with members of groups ranging from families to nations, from religious congregations to professional associations (such as those to which archaeologists belong). These linkages are often also expressed through the use of material symbols, such as when we wear flag pins to express national allegiances or display religious symbols in our houses. There is, therefore, a complex and shifting relationship among our sense of self, the culture providing the categories of identity on

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  291

which we can draw, the contexts in which we express those affiliations, and the items used to express them. The authors, for example, are simultaneously parents in a nuclear family, participants in book groups, professional archaeologists, employees of a college, members of occupation-based associations, and citizens of a town, state, and nation. We do not proclaim these identities all at once, and some are more important in certain situations than others. Hence, when attending graduations at our college we wear garb that distinguishes our profession (scholar-teachers) and indicate where we obtained our PhDs. The acts we engage in on such occasions mark our association with that institution (including processions, songs, and speeches that highlight the importance of the college in our collective lives). When attending a professional meeting, however, our collegiate identity is overshadowed by our archaeological affiliation, which is usually marked by wearing distinctive badges and engaging in acts that set us apart as members of the field (such as attending sessions where research reports are presented, and trading stories of our investigations). While we cannot and should not project the specific range of identities defined in modern Western societies back into the past, it is likely that prehistoric people also had a variety of intersecting affiliations. The different schools of thought considered here have, to differing degrees, broached the issue of identity and its relation to material culture with respect to Stonehenge. How their practitioners have grappled with this set of issue reveals a great deal about the nature of these theoretical perspectives. The antiquaries were very concerned to assign a named cultural affiliation to the people who constructed Stonehenge. They collected data pertaining to the site’s final form in efforts to decide whether Romans, Druids, or some other historically known group was responsible for this architectural marvel. Their work was underlain by the assumption that each of the candidates for Stonehenge’s creators possessed a distinctive, relatively unchanging culture that informed all that they did, including arranging massive stone blocks. Because of this direct and fairly unambiguous link between culture and behavior, ancient culture groups could be unequivocally recognized in their material remains. The culture historical version of identity was the “archaeological culture,” defined on the basis of a regularly occurring assemblage of stylistically distinct artifacts and features (or traits). The appearance of similar materials in limited spatial distributions was assumed to signal the former existence and distribution of a particular cultural group. These entities were often named after a characteristic artifact. For example, in Western Europe at the time of Stonehenge’s construction and use, one of the most important artifacts used to define an archaeological culture was a kind of pottery vessel called the beaker. It is a tall, flat-bottomed vase with a gently out-flaring neck, usually decorated with geometric designs etched into the surface. These distinctive ceramics date to 2400–1800 BC and are distributed through the Iberian

292  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

Peninsula, Holland, Belgium, parts of France, Germany, Britain, and Ireland. A widespread shared “culture” was inferred from the extensive distribution of this stylistic type. References can still be found in the literature to the “Beaker People,” though today often with qualifications to show that there was no monolithic “Beaker Culture.” There are some similarities in the ways in which culture historians and antiquaries approached the relation between material remains and identity. Both drew a direct connection between the values and practices of a specific culture, on the one hand, and the nature of the objects they produced. Ancient cultures could, thus, be recognized in distinctive arrangements and styles of artifacts and constructions. Culture historians, however, drew on a wider array of materials in identifying past cultures than did antiquaries, paying close attention to styles in ceramics, stone and metal tools, as well as architectural forms. More attention was also devoted within the culture historical framework to changes in these reconstructed cultures over time. Still, there was an enduring assumption that each culture was characterized by certain diagnostic items. Study the latter and you could reconstruct the former. There was also a tendency in culture historical research to submerge the individual within the group. Identity was a culture-wide phenomenon, the precepts and practices that defined a culture were widely shared among all its members. Processualists retained this focus on group identity. Cultures were now defined by their integrated subsystems, with a particular focus on the means by which those entities adjusted to their physical environments and maintained the solidarity needed to achieve those adaptations. Individuals and their decisions were not important. People did what was essential to ensure group survival whether or not they realized the consequences of their actions in promoting adaptation and social equilibrium. Social differences within groups were not ignored. The differential distributions of goods, housing, and/or foods could signal social distinctions of power and wealth. Such factions were recognized, but usually interpreted in terms of hierarchical distinctions. As noted above, these divisions were not seen as fragmenting society but as providing the leadership needed to maintain its integrity and coherence. Interestingly, as much as processualists defined themselves in opposition to the precepts of culture history, they adopted as basic units of analysis the territorially bounded cultures defined by members of the latter school. Culture historians saw the cultures they defined as packages of traits that manifest values and practices shared by a group. Processualists, in contrast, viewed these cultures as reflections of functioning systems composed of interrelated parts. Material culture, to processualists, was both a marker of cultural identity and the means of instigating and preserving cultural unity and survival. In both cases, however, identity was lodged at the group level.

Multiple Views of Stonehenge  293

Interpretive approaches stress that there are no bounded entities, and that within groups, however they are defined, there are factions with agendas that sometimes intersect but also diverge. Such divergence can cause conflict. Individuals do not share equally in all aspects of culture. Some people have more knowledge, better skills, a greater interest in one realm of action, say pottery making, than another, say fashioning stone tools. Everyone has to survive, but not everyone needs to have the same ideas, nor do they have to act in the same ways. Hence, people in any culture may operate within a shared frame of meaning and expectation but negotiate their relations to that frame differently. In the case of Stonehenge, the monument’s form was instrumental in forging experiences in which people directly confronted differences based, for example, on how close they were to the center of ceremonies performed there. Because this is a purely prehistoric case, we do not know how these distinctions related to such differences as those among people of different genders and ages. What interpretive approaches to Stonehenge highlight, however, is how material culture may have figured in the creation of a symbolic environment, existing within and among sites, through which the unity of past cultures was simultaneously affirmed and fragmented as people participated differentially in the same ceremonies. The search for identity has now shifted to the sub-cultural level. Material remains are assessed for how they might have figured in the creation of interpersonal differences. Stonehenge continues to serve as a touchstone for identities in groups as large as the European Union (EU) and as small as the local archaeology society, as well as for individuals. Stonehenge is a symbol of national identity with meaning, at least in a bureaucratic sense, for cultural heritage managers in Britain. There have also been efforts to associate Stonehenge with the Celts, thus pushing that ethnic identity into the deep past—which is a highly debatable enterprise—and uniting the people of Britain with those in the EU who also claim Celtic ancestors. Since Celtic speakers were once found from Turkey to Ireland, a case has been made that Celts are a foundational population in Europe. Integrating “Celtishness” into modern identity thus pulls together the past and present, and unites people of different nationalities. Going back to the individual, for a Neo-Druid, the EU-Celt linkage might not be important, but Stonehenge’s religious symbolism may well be crucial in defining their sense of self as an individual and member of a group of like-minded believers. Stonehenge is thus polysemous: that is, it means many things to many people, on a wide variety of scales. Archaeologists are implicated in these processes, offering interpretations that are variably adopted by those constantly using material culture to redefine themselves in relation to others and the past. This is one arena in which archaeological research has modern relevance. It is here that our theories intersect data and current concerns, often yielding results we could not have imagined and can rarely control.

294  Multiple Views of Stonehenge

Think about this the next time you look at an image of Stonehenge and contemplate what it means to you. Most likely those thoughts are influenced by what you have read about the site, what you want to believe about the past and its relation to the present, and what you might have experienced through a visit. Stukeley’s Stonehenge is not your Stonehenge, nor our Stonehenge, nor Britain’s Stonehenge. It is all of these and more—and less as well, perhaps.

14 Conclusions

As we finish the last details of this book, it’s been a few months since we ­returned from a field season in Honduras. The questions we asked were about the manufacture and distribution of ceramics, and the excavations were designed to look for pottery kilns, workshop debris, and samples of sherd types for analysis in the US. The results met expectations—we found two superimposed kilns at La Sierra and many sherds and other artifacts—and confounded them: we now have evidence of the high heats needed for metal-working (clay turned glassy) as well as slag from metal. Fieldwork is always a joy. We have already sent off some carbon samples; the sherds and clay samples ­ icro-probe, to be examined are prepared for analysis by Neutron Activation, m X-ray fluorescence, and petrography. Our ideas about what was going on in Naco and the Cacaulapa Valley immediately to the south are already changing. A new craft has been added to the Naco repertoire (copper working), but the artisans at that site do not have the imported goods the workers in the Cacaulapa had: no green obsidian or Plumbate pottery, both imported from Mexico. They do have polychrome pottery from the Petén, Guatemala, an area in the heart of Classic Maya territory; no Petén wares have been found in the Cacaulapa Valley. Fieldwork has always changed our ideas about prehistory as well as the theories we use to understand the past. Although we still are immersed in Marxian approaches, we mentioned in other chapters that postmodern theories are becoming more interesting to us and applicable in our work. So theoretical viewpoints change for us, too, when new data are acquired, or we re-examine the existing data set. This final section shows in a more abstract way what we go through, and have gone through, in careers. It draws on arguments articulated throughout the book to examine how archaeological knowledge emerges from a conjunction of recovered data, the theories available for interpreting those materials, and the researcher’s appreciation for the utility of those theories. This knowledge structure enables and also constrains further investigations. It enables them in that the intersection of data and theory, mediated through hypothesis testing, can yield fresh insights into past actions that suggest new questions to be asked, like those that drove our most recent investigations.

296  Conclusions

The structure is constraining in that theories are focusing mechanisms ­d irecting our attention to particular sets of factors and their relations, while ignoring others. The intersection of theory and data, therefore, inevitably raises specific queries while obscuring others. The knowledge that results from applying theory to data is also dynamic, shifting as new findings come to light, new theories are developed, and our experiences with both change. These fluid relations guarantee that what we know about the past, our evaluations of what constitutes an inference to the best explanation, are forever changing.

What Have We Learned about Naco Valley Prehistory? The short answer to that question might be, “The more you dig the less you know.” This glib remark states a fundamental truth. After the 1975–1979 field seasons we were fairly certain that Late Classic Naco Valley society was moderate in size and organized within a relatively simple hierarchy. Leading that hierarchy were notables who ruled by virtue of their privileged connections with Copán’s lowland Maya lords. Everyone in the valley lived similar lives, but those in the ruling class drew on the tribute and labor of their subordinates to support a relatively leisured, if not sumptuous, lifestyle. By 1991 much of that supposed knowledge had been challenged. La Sierra’s rulers were far more powerful than we had imagined, their preeminence underwritten by centralized monopolies over the production and distribution of essential commodities. Connections with neighboring areas, including the Copán realm, remained important; they were sources of some of the valuables used to create the bonds of dependency that underwrote elite power. These foreign contacts were nonetheless diverse and Naco Valley’s lords enjoyed considerable freedom in using imported raw materials (such as obsidian cores), finished goods (especially decorated pottery vessels), and ideas (materialized by such structures as the ball court) to meet their own objectives. The 1992–1996 field seasons successfully questioned this newly won understanding of the past. What had been a static image of a La Sierra ­polity that had endured for three centuries became a more dynamic landscape. ­Relations among power, wealth, and crafts across that terrain were anything but stable. Successful efforts to centralize control over the valley by La Sierra’s Late Classic elites were possibly facilitated by their encouragement of craft production at the capital. Though they may never have fully monopolized all manufacturing tasks, these magnates seemingly did benefit from their control over large-scale pottery production, shell working, obsidian blade knapping, and the distribution of esteemed foreign ceramic containers. The fall of these dynasts in the ninth century changed the political, cultural, and economic structure of the basin. Though some potentates remained ensconced at the old capital, 12 other political centers were founded, each home to elites who exercised some control over their segments of the former unified realm.

Conclusions  297

Throughout the Naco Valley people of all ranks took advantage of changing political relations to engage in specialized manufacture. These crafts generated surpluses given in return for prosaic goods as well as those imported valuables still circulating within local exchange networks. Power now seems to have arisen out of intense, and intensely complex, interactions among people of all ranks, occupations, and places of residence. The 2013 season, outlined above, will, too, change our ideas about who had power, how knowledge was variously obtained and used, and other aspects of the valley’s past. This sequence illustrates the shifting nature of what constitutes an inference to the best explanation. What we thought was a “best explanation” of Naco Valley prehistory at any one point was a product of the theories available in the literature, which of them we chose to use, and the data gathered in the course of fieldwork guided by theory. Unexpected finds would challenge the assumptions of our guiding theory, leading us to search the extant array of conceptual structures for those that helped us make sense of these discoveries. Hence, when we started work in the Naco Valley in 1975, culture history’s prevalence in Southeast Mesoamerican studies and processualism’s dominance of theoretical debate within archaeology strongly predisposed us to adopt these perspectives in our work. Such approaches as PGT and PT were not accessible to us, and so could not inform our search for, and interpretation of, data at the project’s inception. Changing appreciations of Naco Valley prehistory were thus enabled and constrained by the research structure in which we worked, a framework that was contingent on the state of theory development, data gathering, and our shifting understandings of both at any moment. The same case can be made for the longer term research efforts outlined for southern Mesopotamia and Stonehenge. Archaeologists working in these places in 1950 operated within a different research structure than those who studied these areas and sites in 2000. Changes in archaeological theory during those five decades opened up new interpretive possibilities, the pursuit of which generated novel data that encouraged the application of additional conceptual schemes. What we knew of life in southern Mesopotamia during the fifth to the third millennia BC changed over this span in large part because of the dynamic interplay among theory, data, and the perceptions of researchers. Similarly, the results of the Riverside Project on Salisbury Plain were motivated by interpretivist approaches that sought to place Stonehenge in its ancient landscape. The new information generated by this work, in turn, required archaeologists of all theoretical persuasions to reformulate their understandings of the monument.

What Does this Tell Us About the Nature of Archaeological Research? In Chapter 1 we stressed that theories are essential research tools that focus attention on certain aspects of reality. Investigations are not possible without

298  Conclusions

these conceptual structures, but all studies are inevitably biased by the theories that guide them. Such observations raise significant questions concerning how we come to learn about the world. Are theory and data so firmly wedded that the former determines what we see? If so, then what can be said about past people depends less on how they lived and more on what our conceptual frameworks tell us should be the case. Alternatively, do data exist apart from theory such that judicious testing of ideas against findings will reveal which explanations are best? The truth lies somewhere between these extremes. But what have our examples taught us about the relation among theory, data, methods, and knowledge? Seeing What You Expect to See First, theory does condition us to look at the world in certain ways. Researchers pursuing investigations guided by processualist and Marxian premises in southern Mesopotamia, for example, saw evidence of cities, hierarchy, and centralized control of land in different lights. What comprised an inference to the best explanation differed among them. To processualists cities, hierarchy, and centralized control over land were parts of organizations that promoted adaptation. To Marxians they were the means by which a few gained advantages over many. Similarly, where some processualists saw a monument to a particular form of communal power at Stonehenge, some interpretivists perceive a symbolic structure that conditioned experiences in ways that promoted culturally constructed understandings of difference among the living, and between them and the revered dead. We saw time and again in our Naco Valley studies how difficult it was for us to perceive aspects of the archaeological record that were not highlighted in the theory we were employing at the time. When operating under PGT, for example, we were reluctant to accept evidence for specialized production in rural settlements. Further, our difficulty identifying the pottery kiln found at La Sierra in 1990 resulted in large part from long-standing assumptions about the nature of craft manufacture in Southeast Mesoamerica. These presuppositions, in turn, were deeply rooted in the culture historical perspective. Theory does predispose you to view the world from a certain perspective, making it relatively easy to observe certain things but not others. Seeing Beyond Theory’s Expectations Second, theory’s dominion over perception is not absolute. It is possible to observe what our conceptual structures obscure, though it is never easy. Diffusionist accounts of Stonehenge’s origins were thus countered by Carbon14 analyses that were not intended to undermine this view. In our own work, we had trouble identifying that pottery kiln but eventually did so. Along the same lines, we did not want to recognize at first that a wide array of goods was fashioned at diverse scales and levels of intensity throughout

Conclusions  299

the Naco Valley, but did come to acknowledge that fact. A conceptual framework may guide you down a relatively narrow research path, but that route need not be a rut you are fated to follow because of your theoretical perspective. Obstacles to Vision Third, pursuing some research topics is discouraged in specific cases because the data are insufficient, the theories for their study are unavailable, and/or the researcher does not choose to recognize certain questions and approaches as interesting. An example drawn from our own work concerns our inability to address questions of gender in Naco Valley prehistory. There is no lack of theory dealing with this topic in archaeology and methods based on these conceptual frameworks have been available for quite some time. Still, we consistently failed to find the sorts of evidence Pollock drew on to identify gender-based hierarchies in early southern Mesopotamia. Accounts describing how gender helped shape the lives of Southeast Mesoamerica’s current and historically known indigenous people are very few. Archaeological data often used to address such topics, such as the patterned relations among interments of people of different sexes and the goods buried with them, were not recovered for any period in the Naco Valley. The few representations of clear male and female bodies that we found, especially on ceramic figurines, whistles, and ocarinas, also do not offer a clear picture of how gender was defined and how it affected human interactions. We, therefore, regretfully conclude that in this particular case we cannot successfully investigate questions of gender. Some of our colleagues, such as Rosemary Joyce, have fruitfully dealt with the issue in nearby areas, but usually in situations where there are texts and/or solid information derived from archaeological contexts that speak to gender issues. Gender is an important topic and there is no lack of theory that facilitates its study. Our experience in the Naco Valley indicates, however, that theory alone does not determine what issues will be examined. The nature of the data recovered may well enable some investigations while making others difficult to consider. Sharing Information across Theoretical Divides Fourth, information gathered under the aegis of one theory can be used by researchers operating within other conceptual structures. We saw this in the case of southern Mesopotamia where investigators working from one perspective freely drew on information provided by those pursuing research guided by different premises. Culture historians, processualists, Marxians, and interpretivists may well differ profoundly on the political significance of those institutions that controlled land, water, and labor in southern Mesopotamia by 3200 BC. Nonetheless, they all used information gathered by their colleagues who espoused different theoretical positions. The detailed

300  Conclusions

stratigraphic analyses conducted by culture historians at Stonehenge revealed the site’s complex history, a history that researchers of different schools have to take into account when discerning astronomical alignments or shifts in meaningful structures. In a similar vein, as we chose among varied theories throughout the course of our Naco Valley investigations, information that was accumulated under earlier conceptual structures was incorporated into interpretations phrased from different vantage points. In fact, it was often data collected under one theory that led us to question the utility of that approach and to consider another. Not only are data not determined by theory, they can be used to challenge the conceptual structure within which they were gathered and contribute to the research of those guided by different premises. Theory and Methods Fifth, the methods used to gather data are strongly influenced by theory but are transferrable among investigators working from diverse theoretical positions. Hence, we saw in southern Mesopotamia and at Stonehenge that the techniques pioneered by culture historians to create chronologies were adopted by those who subscribed to other schools of thought. Similarly, survey methods crucial to processualists in measuring connections among population numbers, natural resources, and administrative structures are employed by Marxians and interpretivists in their studies. Throughout the Naco Valley investigations we also used methods drawn from diverse schools. In fact, it was in the course of using principles of seriation and stratigraphy developed by culture historians that the Terminal Classic was eventually clearly distinguished from the Late Classic. This revelation, in turn, encouraged us to adopt a new theory, PT, as we rethought developments dating to the ninth through tenth centuries in the basin. Methods founded on venerable precedents can thus inspire novel interpretations. How Real are Schools of Thought? Sixth, we should be cautious about ascribing too much significance to the schools of thought described in this or any text. Like all models, the depiction of conceptual variety presented throughout this book simplified a complex reality to make it intelligible. The examples of research guided by theory that are provided in these pages suggest that the insights, methods, and data derived from numerous theories are regularly combined in archaeological practice. We are, for example, all culture historians in our fieldwork insofar as we chart culture change. Similarly, in attending to human–environment relations, we rely on the work of processualists, just as considerations of power often lead us to review what Marxians have said on the topic. Rather than seeing the domain of archaeological thought divided among clear schools, therefore, it might be best to view these more-or-less coherent bodies of theory as representing tendencies within a dense web of interpretive

Conclusions  301

possibilities. Some of us settle on a particular school and use its premises to guide our investigations throughout our careers. Others of us are eclectic, drawing inspiration from different perspectives as the data we gather, the articles we read, or both, offer tantalizingly novel avenues for study. The question is not which approach is right but which one most benefits your research. The only person who can answer that question is you. In short, theory comes alive as it is applied to investigations. That complex intersection of data, methods, and thought rarely conforms to the neat categorical distinctions among schools of thought. The latter have permeable boundaries across which methods, findings, and researchers move over time. This process is on display in our Naco Valley investigations and can be seen in the work of multiple scholars pursuing research dealing with southern Mesopotamia and late Neolithic Britain. How We Learn and What We Know The above six points suggest that we might usefully draw a distinction between how we learn about the past and what we know about it. The learning process involves focusing attention on a manageable topic and using specific methods to gather certain kinds of data relevant to that topic, all guided by theory. The result is frequently a set of novel insights into a specific set of variables and their relationships (say, between craft production and political power, cities and storage, materials and meaning). What we know in aggregate about the people who lived in any area at certain points in time, however, is built on a complex amalgam of diverse data gathered using multiple methods under the guidance of different theories. No one theory, therefore, determines what we come to apprehend about our object of study. That knowledge is the outcome of many studies guided by diverse conceptual structures. Why so Many Theories? Why do we need so many theories? This returns us to some of the issues raised in Chapter 1. Human behavior, in any era, is conditioned by so wide an array of variables that no one theory could usefully address them all. Trying to do so would undermine theory’s greatest advantage: its power to focus attention on important components of human actions and their causes. If this is the case, then there will always be valid reasons for people of good faith to espouse and elaborate different conceptual frameworks that highlight specific facets of human behavior while inevitably leaving some other, equally interesting, features of those events and processes in the shadows. Grasping the richness of past lives requires drawing insights from multiple approaches. There is no reason to think that archaeology will ever be characterized by one, overarching conceptual scheme. In fact, fragmentation, rather than

302  Conclusions

unity, will probably always characterize archaeological theory. Learning to appreciate the values of other’s views, and the inevitable limitations of our own, may well help us advance the common cause of understanding the lives of past people in all their complexity. Do Not Be Afraid to Fail One message that comes through our research in the Naco Valley is that there is something to be said for failure. As you have seen, every year that we returned to the basin we were confronted with stark evidence that our interpretations of that basin’s prehistory were flawed. As we hope you also saw, it was in course of confronting these limitations that we learned something. Finding out how wrong we were about La Sierra’s size made us aware of how powerful its Late Classic rulers had been. Realizing how misguided we were about the persistence of centralized craft monopolies during the Terminal Classic opened the door to considering how people might have used specialized manufacture in strategies to secure power. The examples go on and on. Learning in general often involves challenging your assumptions about the world and undermining your complacency about how things work. The archaeological record has the capacity to surprise you at every turn. Staying alert for these surprises, and learning from them, requires that you pay close attention to theory. Theory and Communication Theory also plays a role in promoting communication among investigators. Throughout the history of Naco Valley studies our search for new conceptual frameworks constantly forced us to look outside Southeast Mesoamerica, and sometimes outside archaeology, to find inspiration. This meant that we had to be aware of the various ways world systems, prestige goods, and practice theory were applied in a variety of prehistoric, historic, and modern contexts. In the process we certainly learned something about capitalist expansion from the fifteenth century onwards or the importance of metallurgy in defining political hierarchies in Bronze Age Scandinavia. More importantly, we became aware of what our colleagues working in other world areas were thinking and were sensitized to the various ways such broad processes as political centralization might act everywhere, but nowhere in exactly the same ways. Paying attention to theory, therefore, broadened our vision of archaeology and of human behavior. When engaged in this borrowing it is important to understand in some detail the contexts in which the theory from which you draw inspiration is used. Without knowing that context, you will be borrowing blindly, running the risk of misusing methods, concepts, and findings in your own work. Such misapplications sow confusion in the literature as concepts with one set of meanings in a specific theory are employed differently in new interpretive

Conclusions  303

settings. For example, fruitful applications of world systems theory to prehistoric cases required careful and explicit redefinition of such key terms as core, periphery, and semi-periphery that originally were used to describe the spread of capitalism and explain its effects on political economies around the globe. Failure to make this translation only muddies discussions of long-­ distance interactions as readers wonder how Researcher 1 is using “core” in her analysis and how it relates to its original meaning in world systems theory and to the way it is employed by Researcher 2. Learning about diverse theories and their applications also alerts you to the implications your data have for debates in the social sciences and the relevance of those discussions for what your findings might mean. Such tacking back and forth between the abstract and prosaic helps ensure that what we learn from our studies does not remain locked up within them, accessible only to ourselves and other specialists. All theories give you the vocabulary to translate specific observations into statements that others working in diverse domains of study can understand, applaud, or challenge. By using theory to communicate, you contribute to the broad discourse about what it means to be human. Such conversations are impossible without theory. Theory both constrains and enables these conversations. It is relatively easy to talk with people with whom you share the same perspectives, who employ the same, or similar, conceptual structures in their work. Theory’s tendency to channel conversation along certain lines, and among particular scholars, is an unintended consequence of what theory does best, that is concentrate attention on selected aspects of a complex reality. We do not need, however, to treat theory’s blinkers as natural obstacles to communication. Those scholars drawing inspiration across conceptual divides in southern Mesopotamia and at Stonehenge, for example, are clearly bridging such gaps. We best serve ourselves, the field, and those we study when we acknowledge the limitations, as well as the advantages, of all conceptual schemes and familiarize ourselves with the premises underlying different viewpoints. Doing so makes it possible for us to adopt new theories as our research directions change. Being well-versed in theory also helps us to understand what our colleagues who are pursuing other investigations guided by different principles have to say. As when we are able to speak multiple languages, we can talk with people from diverse backgrounds and grasp the points they are making. What is Archaeological Truth? As discussed throughout the text, archaeological knowledge is unstable. What we think happened and why it occurred are constantly shifting as: 1) new theories are developed; 2) novel methods based on those constructs are deployed;

304  Conclusions

3) data generated by these studies are published; and 4) researchers’ views of said theories, methods, and data shift. Such dynamism raises the problem of reliability. If the structure of archaeological knowledge is changeable, why should we trust it? Could it be undermined by more data and new theories? The answer to both of these questions is “yes.” We are thus well-advised to accept any inference to the best explanation of past events as the best one available given the state of theory, methods, and data at the time it was made. What we can say now about southern Mesopotamian political developments, relations among crafts and power in the Naco Valley, and the meaning of Stonehenge are certainly far more nuanced than anything that could have been offered earlier. These statements also probably come closer to capturing the complex reality of ancient lives than do earlier interpretations. At the same time, some very wrong accounts of the past have been eliminated from consideration. We are, for example, no longer looking to: Sumerians as the bringers of civilization; the Mycenaeans as inspiration for Stonehenge’s creation; the actions of Maya nobles as catalysts for political developments in the Naco Valley. There is comfort in those negative conclusions. Years of fieldwork have narrowed the range of possible interpretations, excluding some as highly unlikely. Saying that the truth of human prehistory is contingent on theories, methods, data, and investigators’ perceptions of all three does not detract from the validity of what we can say about the past. It just indicates that those truths are incomplete. This partial quality of our findings poses a constant challenge to fill in gaps and evaluate existing claims that future generations take up as they build on the knowledge structures their predecessors created. Archaeological truths, therefore, are always emerging and rarely definitive. In that sense, research never ends. The situation briefly sketched here is not unique to archaeology. It characterizes most of the questions we face throughout our lives. We are forever confronting issues such as what qualifies as a fair government and how do we balance the needs of national security with the right to privacy of individuals. These questions, perhaps all of the important questions, are open-ended, our answers changing as we learn more and learn to consider these queries from different viewpoints. Despite all this preparation, however, we are left with some doubt about how to proceed. In life, as in archaeology, sometimes all you can hope to do is to come to reasoned judgments about what to think and how to act in the face of uncertainty. Perhaps the biggest mistake you can make in interpreting the past or understanding the present is to think that there is only one right answer, it happens to be the one you know, and there is no way that new findings or fresh insights can change your mind. Such a position is a prescription for bad archaeology. It is a recipe for much larger disasters in the life of our planet and all its residents.

Conclusions  305

Truth for Whom? The above remarks, and those made throughout this book, apply primarily to the ways archaeologists employ theory to understand data. The past is, however, of interest to more than just archaeologists. As is the case for Stonehenge, there are a number of parties who are variably concerned with how our finds are treated and interpreted. Their interests impinge to different degrees on how archaeologists conduct their work and interpret what they find. Part of this variation results from where you study. In our case, very few Hondurans have expressed to us more than a passing interest in what we uncover. Similarly, though the Honduran government continues to oversee our work, its agents have not shown more than a professional interest in what we have found with their help. Though we have conducted outreach programs in schools and other venues to try and involve our hosts in the research, they have tended to listen politely and then go about their business. The situation is fraught with greater uncertainty and anxiety at places like Stonehenge where more individuals and groups have vested interests in how that site and its past are studied and understood. These lay audiences are motivated by concerns that are different from our own, just as the criteria they use to evaluate what constitutes a “best explanation” of the past will diverge from those we employ. It is almost certainly a mistake to try to rank the legitimacy of such approaches according to some universal set of standards. Do archaeologists make better statements about antiquity than members of religious congregations? Than do government agents? What criteria could be used to evaluate the relative worth of such different claims? There are several points we would like to stress about these issues. We as archaeologists are best advised to be clear in our goals and truthful in our statements about what we know and how we know it to all with whom we deal. In doing so, we have an obligation to take seriously what other parties to the discussion have to say about their understanding of history and the materials we recover. We must be open to, and not simply tolerant of, these other ways of understanding the world. This means being attentive to the sensibilities of all stakeholders in the past we study. Accomplishing these goals means being as transparent in our communications about our goals and findings as possible. It is only through such frankness that we can all find something to say to each other and learn the limits of our own knowledge. The emerging field of engaged archaeology takes this cooperation a step further. It does so by seeking to actively engage varied stakeholders in the planning and conduct of archaeological research. This is risky as it requires the archaeologist to give up some control over the conduct of the investigations. One could argue the reverse, that not helping people with a stake in what we study to have their voices heard runs the real risk of further alienating them from archaeology. To be sure, engaging stakeholders in the archaeological enterprise is not easy. The communities with which we work,

306  Conclusions

like communities everywhere, rarely speak with one voice. Along those lines, they do they necessarily share one set of questions about the past that they want to work with us in answering. Expectations of what collaborating with archaeologists will produce might be exaggerated. For example, it can be hard to convince people that the site you want to study with them has great academic, but no touristic, appeal. Here is another example of the sort of open-ended quandary that bedevils us throughout life. As with all such conundrums, there is no right answer and you have to decide how best to proceed in the circumstances within which you find yourself. As you make those reasoned judgments, bear in mind that archaeologists are field scientists who conduct their studies only with the help of many others. What we study is also of some interest to those who help us in our labors. Where possible, we are best advised to collaborate truly with these people, treating them as colleagues in what really is a joint venture.

A Few Final Words Here we return to the question of how archaeological thought is related to archaeological practice, and what roles you have to play in making that connection. Theory is always a means to an end, its goal being to help describe and understand the significance of past behaviors. Abstracted from the research process, at best, theory runs the risk of seeming to be tangential to the project of archaeology. As we hope the arguments developed over the preceding pages have demonstrated, theory is essential to the practice of archaeology and is creatively entwined with everything we say about the past. This is not to claim that theories determine in some absolute sense what we see in the archaeological record and how we interpret it. The physical remains we encounter in the course of fieldwork are critical parts of the research structure that limits, as well as enables our interpretations of ancient actions and their significance. But theory is another major feature of that framework and it is through the use of theory that data make sense. In other words, it is through the use of theory that we can amplify the observations we make of material patterns in productive ways. Theory is woven into anything you read about the past. Understanding those accounts requires being aware of theory’s presence within them. At the worst, considering theories in isolation from data gathering sometimes tempts scholars to compare conceptual structures in order to identify one as best in some absolute sense. This is a fruitless endeavor. It was just this sort of search for unassailable verities on the part of modernists that led some postmodernists to reject the existence of any knowable truth. We think that such strong relativism is as misguided as the robust positivism, or explanation by recourse to universal laws, it was designed to counter. There are many things we can learn about the past and, just as importantly, there are many presuppositions about that past we can challenge effectively. Theory is essential to both intellectual projects. The value of a theory lies in how well it helps

Conclusions  307

you in this process. The synergism of theory, data, and the manner in which you apply the former to understand the latter enables you to learn about the past and contribute to knowledge. As long as the conceptual structure you are using encourages you to ask questions that lead to new insights and on to yet more questions, then it is a valuable tool. When a theory no longer helps clarify what happened and ceases to spur you to perceive what you never thought to observe, then it has lost its utility as far as your investigations at that particular moment are concerned. Just because a theory no longer works for you does not mean that you should reject it forever or criticize others for espousing it. The relevance of any tool, and that is what theory is, depends on the context in which it is employed. That context consists of the data you are confronting, the state of theory development at the moment of confrontation, and your understanding and evaluation of both. As these variables shift, so too will your perceptions of a conceptual framework’s productivity and fruitfulness. Losing track of the contingent utility of theory can lead to fruitless arguments about the absolute superiority or inferiority of different schemes. Not only are such disagreements unresolvable, they discourage intelligent searching by archaeologists for the inspiration different theories can provide. Ignoring the various theories developed by diverse scholars can only slow our understanding of the past and the complex lives of those who shaped it. We owe the people whose remains we study our best efforts at recapturing the vibrancy of their lived experiences and this means being open to the different insights promised by different theories. Finally, we return to one other problem encouraged by treating theory independently of archaeological practice, that is, the tendency to treat theory’s creators as specialists skilled in matters conceptual. Much of the way theory is taught encourages this viewpoint, especially when we single out specific thinkers for their work in developing particular schools of thought. There is no denying the powerful contributions certain archaeologists have made to framing how we think. What is misleading in this characterization, and what is difficult to convey in any theory course, is the simple fact that everyone who conducts research into the past shapes the theoretical framework in which we all come to operate. Those of us participating in the Naco Valley Archaeological Project changed the conceptual schemes we derived from our readings of the literature to match better what we were finding. In this way we modified PGT as well as aspects of PT. Similarly, Adams and Renfrew’s takes on processualism, Diakonoff and Algaze’s applications of Marxian thought, and Pollock, Thomas, and Parker Pearson’s uses of interpretivism are not slavish replications of established theories but creative modifications of those frameworks in novel situations. These transformations, in turn, become parts of the general discourse on archaeological theory through publications and conversations with students and colleagues. Now, multiply these experiences by the number of archaeologists working throughout the world and you see that theory changes less through a particular individual’s inspirations and more through the concerted efforts of numerous scholars.

308  Conclusions

Each researcher changes and enriches our communal conceptual framework as they apply ideas to data in their work. Archaeological theory, in this vision, constitutes a dynamic and democratic field that is constantly being transformed. Every student of the past has a role to play in shaping this conceptual domain. In fact, making such contributions is an inevitable consequence of doing research. We are most effective in developing archaeological theory when we are alert to the various ways that it figures in all aspects of our studies. By sensitizing ourselves to theory’s pervasive influence we can be aware of how these frameworks are inevitably shaped through our actions. We very much hope that this book helps awaken in you a sense of your own role as a theoretician and of the contributions you can make to our increasingly rich understanding of the human past.

Suggested Readings

1 Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences Theory: General Discussions Dark, K., 1995. Theoretical Archaeology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dark offers a clearly articulated perspective on theory in archaeology that differs somewhat from our own. Embree, L., ed., 1992. Metaarchaeology: Reflections by Archaeologists and Philosophers. Springer Science + Business Media. A volume that brought together a wide range of scholars who had been deeply involved in considering the nature of explanation in archaeology to reflect on then-recent developments in that topic. This volume came out at a crucial point in the history of archaeology when post-processualism was on the rise and processualism on the defense. In looking over the table of contents, think about who contributed to the book, who was not part of the volume, what perspectives were included and which were left out. Flannery, K., ed., 1986. Guila Naquitz: Archaic Foraging and Early Agriculture in ­O axaca, Mexico. New York: Academic Press. The part of this rich account of the emergence of domestication in southern Mexico that is most directly relevant to this book is the concluding chapter, written by Flannery. Here he provides an excellent discussion of the nature of theory in archaeology that is both insightful and amusing. Fogelin, L., 2007. Inference to the Best Explanation: A Common and Effective Form of Archaeological Reasoning. American Antiquity 72: 603–625. A succinct and clear exposition of the basic principles of reasoning by inference to the best explanation. Reading Fogelin’s account greatly helped us in understanding this approach to explanation in archaeology. Geertz, C., 1973. The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books, Inc. These are seminal statements by an anthropologist who was among the leaders in articulating the relations among symbols, culture, and human action. See especially the article, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” It is from Geertz’s work that we derived the distinction between models of and for reality in relation to worldviews. Hansen, M. and J. Kelley, 1989. Inference to the Best Explanation in Archaeology. In, Critical Traditions in Contemporary Archaeology. V. Pinsky and A. Wylie eds, pp.  14–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This article presents another lucid discussion of how the concept of “inference to the best explanation” can be applied in archaeological settings.

310  Suggested Readings Hempel, C., 1966. Philosophy of Natural Science. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Archaeologists fell upon this slim volume written by a strong proponent of logical positivism and used it to create processualism. Logical positivism was an approach to understanding the structure of scientific inquiry that stressed rigid adherence to a model of covering laws by which all phenomena could be explained. Kehoe, A., 2008. Controversies in Archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Kehoe develops the notion of inference to the best explanation in her review of how archaeologists evaluate statements about the past. Kuhn, T., 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn’s discussion of paradigms in this book was widely influential in considerations of theory within and beyond the physical sciences. His contention that observations are strongly conditioned by the theory the investigator espouses challenged positivist accounts, like those of Hempel, that saw scientific knowledge as accumulating gradually and continuously through the rigorous application of the scientific method. Nisbett, R. and L. Ross, 1980. Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. A very useful discussion of “knowledge structures” (roughly analogous to the concept of “worldview” employed here) that helps elucidate the ways in which people perceive and understand the world. Especially focuses on the power of established cognitive schemes to affect what is observed and how it is explained. Popper, K., 1989. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 4th ed. London: Routledge. This is an influential statement of the practice of science that was taken to heart by many archaeologists. Popper particularly stressed the importance of refuting theories as a way to understanding the world. Salmon, M., 1982. Philosophy and Archaeology. New York: Academic Press. A systematic approach to the structure of theory in archaeology, focusing on the nature of the conceptual frameworks used in the field (especially those related to processual archaeology) and the means of evaluating hypotheses based on those theories. Watson, P. J., S. LeBlanc, and C. Redman, 1984. Archaeological Explanation: The Scientific Method in Archaeology. New York: Columbia University Press. Watson and her colleagues provide here one of the most thoroughgoing calls for practicing archaeology as a science to appear in print. Though written some time ago, it still offers a clear argument for a scientific approach to the past. Wylie, A., 2002. Thinking with Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology. Berkeley: University of California Press. This collection of articles is written by one of the preeminent philosophers of science working in archaeology. She provides an excellent and balanced overview of the major debates in archaeological theory along with important suggestions as to how they might be resolved. Chapters 11–16, in particular, provide a clear and coherent account of archaeological explanation while Chapter 9 nicely summarizes arguments concerning analogic reasoning in archaeology. Theory: Middle Range and Analogy Binford, L., 1981. Bones: Ancient Men and Modern Myths. New York: Academic Press. This book provides a good discussion of middle-range theory by the scholar who played a major role in introducing the concept.

Suggested Readings  311 Journal of Anthropological Archaeology vol. 38, 2015. This journal issue has 11 articles that both assess the contributions of Lewis Binford and apply his work to a wide range of times and places. The included works look at middle range theory and Binford’s more recent concept, frames of reference. Rabb, L. and A. Goodyear, 1984. Middle Range Theory in Archaeology: A Critical Review of Origins and Applications. American Antiquity 49: 255–168. This article provides a straightforward review of how middle-range theory figures in archaeological interpretations. It appeared at a point when these issues were being much debated by researchers in the field. Schiffer, M., 1976. Behavioral Archaeology. New York: Academic Press. Schiffer, M., 1983. Toward the Identification of Formation Processes. American ­Antiquity 48: 675–706. Schiffer, M., 1987. Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Schiffer, M., 2014. Behavioral Archaeology: Principles and Practice. Equinox Handbooks in Anthropological Archaeology. Abingdon: Routledge. Schiffer and his students in these and other publications laid out the various processes, from human activities to natural events, that determine the patterning we observe in the archaeological record. Their well-taken point was that, unless we can reasonably infer how the artifacts and features we observe came to appear as they do when we uncover them, we cannot make reliable statements about the past from the study of those material remains. Understanding formation processes is a critical part of middle range theory. Tani, M., 1995. Beyond the Identification of Formation Processes: Behavioral Inferences Based on Traces Left Behind by Cultural Formation Processes. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 2: 231–252. Tani argues for a careful consideration of how refuse deposits take shape and how their structure is related to the activities that generated these remains. Part of the article’s relevance to this book lies in how the author applies Schiffer’s ideas about formation processes to understanding the ways in which cultural information can be derived from recovered materials once you understand the events (trash disposal in this case) that resulted in their patterning. Yellen, J., 1977. Archaeological Approaches to the Present. New York: Academic Press. This is an excellent overview of the different uses of analogy in interpreting the remains of past behaviors at the time processualism was solidified as a school. Archaeology, Histories Stocking, G., 1968. Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective. In, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. G. Stocking ed., pp. 195–233. New York: The Free Press. This article remains one of the best reviews of Boas’ contributions to the development of U.S. anthropology. Trigger, B., 1980. Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Prehistory. London: Thames and Hudson. This thoroughgoing and insightful biography highlights Childe’s major contributions to archaeology while reviewing the broader intellectual context in which these concepts took shape and had their impacts. Trigger, B., 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This comprehensive review of theory development in archaeology through the 1980s remains one of the best summaries of the topic.

312  Suggested Readings Willey, G. and J. Sabloff, 1993. A History of American Archaeology, 3rd ed., San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. This book offers a clear description of changes in the interpretive stances adopted by North American archaeologists into the 1990s. It is especially strong in outlining the nature of the culture history perspective. Theory, Evolutionary Archaeology Barton, C. and G. Clark, 1997. Evolutionary Theory in Archaeological Explanation. In, Rediscovering Darwin: Evolutionary Theory and Archaeological Explanation. C. Barton and G. Clark eds, pp. 3–15. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association, Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, No. 7. A clear summary of evolutionary archaeology, an approach to explanation that draws heavily and directly on processes specified in the synthetic theory of biological evolution. We do not address this school of thought here as it does not figure prominently in the case studies. Nevertheless, evolutionary archaeology is an important approach to the past and you could productively start your examination of the topic here. Dunnell, R., 1982. Evolutionary Theory and Archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory: Selections from Volumes 1–4. M. Schiffer ed., pp. 35–99. New York: Academic Press. This is one of the seminal statements of evolutionary archaeology by the scholar who was central to the perspective’s creation (see Barton and Clark, above). Shennan, S., 2008. Evolution in Archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 37: 75–91. Shennan, a major figure in Evolutionary Archaeology, presents the state of the art in this school as of 2008. An excellent review of current trends and major questions in the field. 2 The Naco Valley and Us Naco Valley Prehistory Henderson, J., I. Sterns, A. Wonderley, and P. Urban, 1979. Archaeological Investigations in the Valle de Naco, Northwestern Honduras: A Preliminary Report. Journal of Field Archaeology 6: 169–192. A good summary of where the Naco Valley research stood at the close of the 1977 field season. Schortman, E. and P. Urban, 1994. Living on the Edge: Core/Periphery Relations in Ancient Southeastern Mesoamerica. Current Anthropology 35: 401–430. A synopsis of our views on how developments in the Naco Valley, as we understood them by the early 1990s, might best be understood in their own terms and not as part of a lowland Maya periphery. Schortman, E. and P. Urban, 2011. Networks of Power in the Late Postclassic Naco Valley, Northwestern Honduras. Boulder: The University Press of Colorado. Summarizes the results of our research on the Naco Valley’s political economy during the last pre-Columbian centuries (AD 1300–1532). Urban, P., 1986. Precolumbian Settlement in the Naco Valley, Northwestern Honduras. In, The Southeast Maya Periphery. P. Urban and E. Schortman eds, pp. 275–295. Austin: University of Texas Press. This summary expresses Pat’s understanding of Naco Valley prehistory as of the end of the 1979 field season. Urban, P., E. Schortman, and M. Ausec, 2002. Power Without Bounds? Middle Preclassic Political Developments in the Naco Valley, Honduras. Latin American Antiquity 13: 131–152. Summarizes Middle Preclassic (1250–400 BC) developments in the Naco Valley, comparing them to events in surrounding portions of Southeast Mesoamerica.

Suggested Readings  313 The Archaeology of Households Carballo, D., 2011. Advances in the Household Archaeology of Highland Mesoamerica. Journal of Archaeological Research 18: 133–189. Nash, D., 2009. Household Archaeology in the Andes. Journal of Archaeological ­R esearch 17: 205–261. Pluckhahn, T., 2010. Household Archaeology in the Southeastern United States: Histories, Trends, and Challenges. Journal of Archaeological Research 18: 331–385. Robin, C., 2003. New Directions in Maya Household Archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Research 11: 307–356. These articles by Carballo, Nash, Pluckhahn, and Robin provide thorough reviews of how the study of ancient domestic groups has proliferated in its research foci and grown ever more sophisticated in its use of theory to understand the relations of these residential units to the political, social, and economic systems in which they were embedded. Hendon, J., 1996. Archaeological Approaches to the Organization of Domestic Labor: Household Practice and Domestic Relations. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 45–61. This insightful review of household studies offered a fresh perspective on these crucial units of analysis. Netting, R., R. Wilk, and E. Arnould, eds, 1985. Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group. Berkeley: University of California Press. A wide-ranging, cross-cultural study of households that had a major impact on archaeologists who were, by the early 1980s, trying to establish the study of smallscale domestic groups on a firm evidentiary and theoretical footing. Santley, R. and K. Hirth, eds, 1993. Prehispanic Domestic Units in Western Mesoamerica. Boca Raton: CRC Press. This is a significant contribution to the literature on ancient households in Mesoamerica. The contribution by Santley and Kneebone was especially important to us as we strove to understand how crafts and domestic activities might be accommodated within Late and Terminal Classic Naco Valley households. Schwartz, G. and S. Falconer, eds, 1994. Archaeological Views from the Countryside: Village Communities in Early Complex Societies Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. These essays convey the growing recognition of the varied ways commoners and elites, rural and urban populations together create the political and economic systems in which they live. The collection also provides an effective antidote to top-down views of culture change. Wattenmaker, P., 1998. Household and State in Upper Mesopotamia. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. This is a nuanced case study of the complex interrelations between power and craft production in one of the world’s earliest states. Wilk, R. and W. Ashmore, eds, 1988. Household and Community in the Mesoamerican Past. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. This is an influential collection of essays, heavily slanted towards studies of the Maya lowlands, that deals with the structure and organization of ancient Mesoamerican domestic groups. 3 Culture History Childe, V. G., 1925. The Dawn of European Civilization. London: Keagan Paul. In this, one of his earliest published works, Childe lays out some of the basic precepts that guided his studies of European culture history.

314  Suggested Readings Kroeber, A., 1939. Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kroeber provides here a classic statement and application of the Boasian approach to organizing anthropological data. Kroeber, A., 1940. Stimulus Diffusion. American Anthropologist 32: 1–20. This essay offers a clear and concise exposition of one of culture history’s basic processes of culture change. Lyman, R. and M. O’Brien, 2006. Measuring Time with Artifacts: A History of Methods in American Archaeology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lyman and O’Brien provide a detailed account that relates the development of such basic culture historical techniques as stratigraphic analysis and seriation to trends in archaeological theory. As with the following book, the perspective adopted here is avowedly that of evolutionary archaeology. Lyman, R., M. O’Brien, and R. Dunnell, 1997. The Rise and Fall of Culture History. New York: Plenum Press. In this book the authors offer a review of the strengths and weaknesses of the culture history school. Lyman, O’Brien, and Dunnell are major figures in evolutionary archaeology. Willey, G. and D. Lathrap, eds, 1956. An Archaeological Classification of Culture Contact Situations. In, Seminars in Archaeology 1955. R. Wauchope ed., pp. 3–30. Salt Lake City: Society for American Archaeology. This was an important effort to systematize archaeological treatments of diffusion and other related culture historical processes. Willey, G. and P. Phillips, 1958. Method and Theory in American Archaeology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Willey and Phillips offer here a classic expression of the culture historical approach. Archaeology, Methods Brainerd, G., 1951. The Place of Chronological Ordering in Archaeological Analysis. American Antiquity 16: 301–313. This is a classic early statement on the principles of seriation. Harris, E., 1975. The Stratigraphic Sequence: A Question of Time. World Archaeology 7: 109–121. Harris provides a detailed, thorough consideration of how stratigraphic principles are used in archaeological dating with some suggestions for improvements in their applications. Renfrew, C. and P. Bahn, 2008. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practices. London: Thames and Hudson. This engagingly written textbook provides a thorough review of archaeological dating techniques as well as approaches to survey and excavation. Sharer, R. and W. Ashmore, 2013. Archaeology: Discovering our Past. New York: McGraw Hill. A very good textbook that will give you a clear sense of the different dating techniques used by archaeologists and how surveys are conducted. Wintle, A., 1996. Archaeologically Relevant Dating Techniques for the Next Century. Journal of Archaeological Science 23: 123–138. Though focused on methods of dating our hominid ancestors, this article provides an excellent overview of some of the basic procedures used to create archaeological chronologies in general. Mesoamerica, General Discussions Adams, R., 2005. Prehistoric Mesoamerica. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. This text provides a comprehensive overview of developments in Mesoamerica, from the arrival of the first people to the Spanish Conquest.

Suggested Readings  315 Ashmore, W., 1991. Site Planning Principles and Concepts of Directionality among the Ancient Maya. Latin American Antiquity 2: 199–226. A clear, succinct statement of the ways in which cosmological principles were expressed through the arrangement of monumental buildings at major Classic period (AD 200–900) lowland Maya centers. Ashmore, W. and J. Sabloff, 2002. Spatial Orders in Maya Civic Plans. Latin American Antiquity 13: 201–215. An updated version of Ashmore’s earlier position that takes account of the effect a site’s history has on how ideological and political principles are expressed in its arrangement. Demarest, A., P. Rice, and D. Rice, eds, 2004. The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. The papers in this excellent collection summarize research on the Terminal Classic across the Maya lowlands. Kirchoff, P., 1952. Mesoamerica: Its Geographical Limits, Ethnic Composition, and Cultural Characteristics. In, Heritage of Conquest, S. Tax ed., pp. 17–30. New York: The Free Press. This article conveys an idea of how culture areas were defined by those pursuing research in the culture history school. Morley, S. G., 1946. The Ancient Maya. Stanford: Stanford University Press. This volume provides an excellent account of how archaeologists viewed lowland Maya prehistory at the middle of the twentieth century. It has the advantage of having been updated over the years, major revisions being written by George Brainerd (1983) and Robert Sharer (beginning in 1994, later with Loa Traxler in 2006), all titled The Ancient Maya and published by Stanford University Press. Skimming these different versions will give you a good sense of how views of lowland Maya prehistory have changed. Nichols, D. and C. Pool, eds, 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. As the name implies, this text covers a wide range of places and themes relevant to the writing of this diverse area’s prehistory, the entries contributed by experts in their respective fields. Rathje, W., 1972. Praise the Gods and Pass the Metates: A Hypothesis of the Development of Lowland Maya Rainforest Civilization in Middle America. In, Contemporary Archaeology. M. Leone ed., pp. 365–392. Carbondale: Illinois University Press. This is the highly influential essay from which the example of the importance of trade to Classic period Maya societies was drawn. Other trade references appear at the end of Chapters 5 and 6. Southeast Mesoamerica, General Discussions Boone, E. and G. Willey, eds, 1988. The Southeast Classic Maya Zone. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks. The essays compiled here present a diverse set of views on the prehistory of Southeast Mesoamerica. Though the focus is on Copán articles by Demarest, Hirth, and Urban and Schortman cover research in El Salvador and Honduras. Fash, W., 2001. Scribes, Warriors, and Kings: The City of Copán and the Ancient Maya. Revised edition. London: Thames and Hudson. Research at Copán has been ­going on for over a century and continues as of this writing. Thus, there is no definitive last word on developments at this lowland Maya center. Fash’s book nicely synthesizes the results available at the time it was published and gives a clear outline of Copán’s long prehistory. Keep an eye out, however, for volumes and articles

316  Suggested Readings that have appeared since 1991 to see how aspects of earlier interpretations have changed (look especially in the journals Ancient Mesoamerica and Latin American Antiquity). In addition, Andrews, E. and W. Fash, eds, 2005. Copán: The History of an Ancient Maya Kingdom. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press; and Bell, E., M. ­Canuto, and R. Sharer, eds, 2004. Understanding Early Classic Copán. Philadelphia: University Museum Press, are just a few of the volumes that have appeared since 2001 and which deal with Copán. Glass, J., 1966. Archaeological Survey of Western Honduras. In, Handbook of Middle American Indians, Volume 4. G. Ekholm and G. Willey, volume eds, R. Wauchope, series ed. New Orleans: Tulane University Press. This article captures the state of knowledge about Southeast Mesoamerican prehistory as it stood by the mid-1960s. You might find it interesting to compare this account with what P. Healy has to say (see below). Healy, P., 1984. The Archaeology of Honduras. In, The Archaeology of Lower Central America. F. Lange and D. Stone eds, pp. 113–161. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. A good summary of what was known about Honduran prehistory as of the late twentieth century. See also the article by P. Sheets in this same volume that deals with the prehistory of El Salvador. Joyce, R., 1988. The Ulua Valley and the Coastal Maya Lowlands: The View from Cerro Palenque. In, The Southeast Classic Maya Zone. E. Boone and G. Willey, eds, pp. 269–295. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks. Joyce, R., 1991. Cerro Palenque: Power and Identity on the Maya Periphery. Austin: University of Texas Press. This book and article by a leading researcher in Southeast Mesoamerica summarize her early and important research in the Sula Plain on Honduras’s north coast. Joyce’s investigations comprise some of the work to which we referred when discussing the diverse trajectories followed by Southeast Mesoamerican societies during the Late to Terminal Classic transition. Robinson, E., 1987. Interaction on the Southeast Mesoamerican Frontier: Prehistoric and Historic Honduras and El Salvador. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports International Series 327. This collection of essays summarizes general trends in Southeast Mesoamerican prehistory as they were understood in the middle 1980s. Schortman, E., P. Urban, W. Ashmore, and J. Benyo, 1986. Interregional Interaction in the Southeast Maya Periphery: The Santa Barbara Archaeological Project 1983–1984 Seasons. Journal of Field Archaeology 13: 259–272. A brief synopsis of the investigations we conducted with our colleagues after 1979 that informed our approach to Naco Valley studies in 1988. Sharer, R., 1990. Quirigua: A Classic Maya Center and its Sculpture. Durham: Carolina Academic Press. A clearly written summary of research conducted at the lowland Maya center of Quirigua through the late twentieth century. Sheets, P., 2005. The Ceren Site: An Ancient Village Buried by Volcanic Ash. New York: Wadsworth Publishing. This clear and concise account of the extraordinarily well-preserved seventh century AD households at the Ceren site in El Salvador established a base-line for household studies in Southeast Mesoamerica. See also, Before the Volcano Erupted: The Ancient Ceren Village in Central America (edited by P. Sheets and published by the University of Texas Press, Austin, 2002), for a more detailed account of this important work. Webster, D., A. Freter, and N. Gonlin, 2007. Copán: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Maya Kingdom. New York: Wadsworth/Thompson Learning. This volume tells the Copán story from an avowedly processualist stance; you might compare it to W. Fash’s book cited earlier.

Suggested Readings  317 Theory, Inter-Societal Interaction and Trade Adams, R., 1974. Anthropological Perspectives on Ancient Trade. Current Anthropology 15: 239–258. A classic summary of the problems with, and potentials of, trade studies in archaeology. Carmack, R, and S. Salgado, 2006. A World-Systems Perspective on the Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Mesoamerican/Lower Central American Border. Ancient Mesoamerica 17: 219–229. To what extent can northern and southern Central America be considered parts of a world system centered on Mesoamerican Postclassic complex societies? The authors conclude that northern Central America constitutes a periphery of a Mesoamerican system tied to it through trade. Lower Central America, on the other hand, developed its own distinct complex societies, and these are related to a potential world system encompassing Chibchan-speaking peoples of Central and South America. Cusick, J., 1998. Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations. Cusick’s volume provides a review of approaches to interregional interaction research including cases from prehistoric and historic contexts. Earle, T. and J. Ericson, eds, 1977. Exchange Systems in Prehistory. New York: Academic Press. Like the Sabloff and Lamberg-Karlovsky volume listed below, this collection contains some of the most influential essays published on trade and its relations to long-term political processes at that time. Gosden, C., 2004. Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000BC to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gosden offers a thought-­ provoking approach that stresses the variety of inter-cultural interaction processes that do not all rely on distinctions between cores and peripheries. Green, S. and S. Perleman, eds, 1985. The Archaeology of Frontiers and Boundaries. New York: Academic Press. This collection of essays deals with inter-societal interaction, especially in the relatively recent past; see, especially, the articles by K. Lewis and R. Paynter. Helms, M., 1976. Ancient Panama: Chiefs in Search of Power. Austin: University of Texas Press. Helms, M., 1988. Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and ­G eographical Distance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Helms, M., 1993. Art and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power. Austin: University of Texas Press. Helms is one of the leading figures in discussions of how ideological and political factors intersect in the context of long-distance interchanges. These books summarize and refine her position on this topic. Art and the Kingly Ideal also highlights the political and conceptual significance of specialized craft production in creating and sustaining political hierarchies. Renfrew, C. and J. Cherry, eds, 1986. Peer Polity Interaction and Sociopolitical Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contributors to this influential volume draw on their experiences working in different world areas to construct an approach to interregional interaction that is an alternative to world systems theory and other perspectives based on trade. Rowlands, M., M. Larsen, and K. Kristiansen, eds, 1987. Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A very influential work that helped shape thinking about the political, economic, and social consequences of relations among polities of varying sizes within interregional exchange networks. Several of the articles employ elements of prestige goods theory.

318  Suggested Readings Sabloff, J. and C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, eds, 1975. Ancient Civilization and Trade. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. The essays in this volume convey the vitality and potential of trade studies in archaeology at the point when interest in the topic was near its peak. See, especially, C. Renfrew’s article, “Trade as Action at a Distance,” an essay that powerfully influenced researchers for many years after its publication. Schortman, E. and P. Urban, 1987. Modeling Interregional Interaction in Prehistory. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 11: 37–95. This article summarizes our take on world systems theory and its utility in archaeology, Written just prior to the 1988 field season, it gives you some idea of what we thought about this approach and how it might be applied to non-capitalist situations. Schortman, E. and P. Urban, eds, 1992. Resources, Power, and Interregional Interaction. New York: Plenum Press. The essays in this volume summarize various approaches to inter-societal interaction, focusing on prestige goods theory (Part III) and world systems theory (Part II). Stein, G., 2002. From Passive Periphery to Active Agents: Emerging Perspectives in the Archaeology of Interregional Interaction. American Anthropologist 104: 903– 916. This essay provides a thoughtful and critical overview of inter-cultural interaction processes in antiquity. Wells, P., 1980. Culture Contact and Culture Change: Early Iron Age Central Europe and the Mediterranean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This case study of interactions among agents of classical Mediterranean civilizations and their “barbarian” neighbors emphasizes the political impact of cultural knowledge flowing along the social networks that linked these very different societies. Wells provides a discussion of cores and peripheries that does not marginalize the latter in favor of the former. Wright, H., 1972. A Consideration of Interregional Exchange in Greater Mesopotamia: 4000–3000 BC. In, Social Exchange and Interaction. E. Wilmsen ed., pp. 95–105. Ann Arbor: Anthropological Papers, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, No. 46. An excellent example of one of the ways in which trade was being used to explain the appearance of cultural complexity in the mid- to late twentieth century. Type-Variety Analysis Smith, Robert E., Gordon R. Willey, and James C. Gifford, 1960. The Type-Variety Concept as a Basis for Analysis of Maya Pottery. American Antiquity 25(3): 330–340. A classic early statement of this approach to ceramic analysis. Urban, P., M. Ausec, E. Schortman, 2012. Looking for the Times: Can Type-­Variety Analysis Help us “See” the Early Postclassic in Northwestern Honduras? In, ­Ancient Maya Pottery: Classification, Analysis, and Interpretation. J. Aimers ed., pp. 163–184. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Though focused on a specific area and time period, the discussion of type-variety analysis here gives you a good sense of how we use this approach to classifying ceramics. The bibliography should give you a start in further investigating this approach to ceramic classification. 4 Processualism Processual Archaeology Binford, L. and S. Binford, eds, 1968. New Perspectives in Archaeology. Chicago: ­A ldine. Essays included in this seminal volume convey processual archaeology in

Suggested Readings  319 full flower. See especially L. Binford’s introductory chapter entitled “Archaeological Perspectives” for an overview of the approach. James Hill’s article, “Broken K Pueblo: Patterns of Form and Function,” is a classic exposition of the methods of hypothesis testing espoused by processual archaeologists. Clarke, D., 1968. Analytical Archaeology. London: Methuen and Co., Ltd. Clarke’s text is an ambitious and highly influential effort to address the structure of archaeological research and interpretation from a systems theory approach. Clarke, D., 1972. Models and Paradigms in Contemporary Archaeology. In, Models in Archaeology. D. Clarke, ed., pp. 1–60. London: Methuen. This essay provides a thorough, systematic overview of relations among theories, models, hypotheses, and data as outlined by one of the leading figures in processual archaeology. Clarke, D. 1973. Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence. Antiquity 47: 6–18. In this short essay Clarke reviews developments in archaeological theory and methods, criticizing the failure of culture historians and processualists (or new archaeologists) to come up with novel forms of explanation and description. Clarke’s outline of levels of theory in archaeology is particularly prescient. Cohen, M., 1977. The Food Crisis in Prehistory. New Haven: Yale University Press. This book provides a good example of arguments that link population growth to the advent of domestication. Flannery, K., 1968. Archaeological Systems Theory and Early Mesoamerica. In, Anthropological Archaeology in the Americas. B. Meggers, ed., pp. 67–87. Washington, D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington. This concise, explicit statement of the principles underlying systems theory and its application to the study of domestication was widely read and cited. Flannery, K., 1972. The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3: 399–426. The article is a clear statement on the application of systems theory to the study of the state. Though Flannery was critical of many aspects of processualism, his essay was and remains widely cited by those studying state formation from the processualist perspective in southern Mesopotamia and elsewhere. Flannery, K., 1973. Archaeology with a Capital “S”. In, Research and Theory in Current Archaeology. C. Redman ed., pp. 47–53. New York: Wiley. Flannery offers here an early and thoroughgoing criticism of the search for general laws in processual archaeology. LeBlanc, S., 1973. Two Points of Logic Concerning Data, Hypotheses, General Laws, and Systems. In, Research and Theory in Current Archaeology C. Redman ed., pp. 199–214. New York: John Wiley and Sons. This is perhaps one of the clearest statements of the basic principles of the method of hypothesis testing employed by processual archaeologists. Longacre, W., 1970. Archaeology as Anthropology: A Case Study. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. This application of processual principles to an archaeological example was widely influential. Lyman, R. L., 2007. What’s the “Process” in Culture Process and Processual Archaeology? Anthropological Theory 7(2): 217–250. The term “process” is used many ways in anthropology, and the author aims to clarify its usage. He covers how the term is employed in cultural anthropology, and then turns to its archaeological uses. In archaeology, “process” was used before the 1960s primarily to discuss diachronic cultural evolution. Beginning in the 1960s, processes became embedded in systems theory models, and later in ideas about the formation processes of the archaeological record. The article concludes with examinations of various processual

320  Suggested Readings models, highlighting their complexity. He ends with suggestions for the further use of process concepts. Watson, P. J., S. LeBlanc, and C. Redman, 1984. Archaeological Explanation: The Scientific Method in Archaeology. New York: Columbia University Press. Watson and her colleagues provide here one of the most thoroughgoing calls for practicing archaeology as a science to appear in print. Though written some time ago, it still offers a clear argument for a scientific approach to the past. Archaeology, Sampling Mueller, J., ed., 1979. Sampling in Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. This collection of essays nicely summarizes some of the arguments for incorporating systematic approaches to sampling in archaeological research. Orton, C., 2000. Sampling in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This comprehensive review covers sampling at multiple levels, from the physical makeup of individual artifacts to regions. While statistics are discussed, the book is not a manual for statistical analysis. Rather, it presents ways that archaeologists might think about sampling strategies. Archaeology, Settlement Survey De Montmollin, O., 1989. The Archaeology of Political Structure: Settlement Analysis in a Classic Maya Polity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. An excellent review of how political structure can be read from settlement patterns. Fish, S. and S. Kowalewski, eds, 1991. The Archaeology of Regions: The Case for Full-Coverage Survey. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. This collection of essays conveys some sense of the debates in the arena of settlement survey, especially those dealing with sampling problems. Kowalewski, S., 2008. Regional Settlement Pattern Studies. Journal of Archaeological Research 16: 225–285. This review summarizes the state of research on the topic from around the world and as it pertains to multiple time periods. Willey, G., 1953. Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Viru Valley, Peru. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 155. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. This is a fundamental, early statement of settlement survey as written by one of the masters of the field. Wilkinson T., 2000. Regional Approaches to Mesopotamian Archaeology: The Contributions of Archaeological Surveys. Journal of Archaeological Research 8: 219– 267. Compares the results of settlement surveys in northern and southern Mesopotamia to reconstruct demographic, economic, and political shifts during the period of early state growth in the area. In addition to providing a good overview of Mesopotamian prehistory, this article will also give you an appreciation for the significance of settlement surveys in archaeological studies of the past. Naco Valley Douglass, J., 2002. Hinterland Households: Rural Agrarian Household Diversity in Northwest Honduras. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. As mentioned in the text, John conducted research with us in 1996 that was inspired in part by processual theory. This case study outlines the results of his work.

Suggested Readings  321 5 Marxism I: Trade and Power Brumfiel, E., 1992. Distinguished Lecture in Archaeology: Breaking and Entering the Ecosystem, Gender, Class, and Faction Steal the Show. American Anthropologist 94: 551–567. Brumfiel offers a clear criticism of aspects of processual archaeology, stressing the importance of agency and conflict in interpretations of the past. Brumfiel, E. and J. Fox, eds, 1994. Factional Competition and Political Development in the New World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This is an important treatment of political processes, such as centralization and hierarchy building, as products of contests for power occurring within social formations. It runs strongly counter to many processualist approaches to the topic. Childe, V. G., 1951. Social Evolution. New York: Schuman. This book, written near the end of his career, provides a good example of Childe’s application of Marxist principles to the study of prehistory. Childe, V. G., 1963. Man Makes Himself. New York: Mentor Books. Childe pioneered both culture historical and Marxist approaches to the study of the past in general, and to understanding developments in southern Mesopotamia in particular. Through time his viewpoints shifted but Childe remains very influential in defining the parameters of study in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates. This specific book, originally published in 1936, is interesting, in part, because of how Childe synthesizes elements of Marxism and Culture History in his interpretations of southern Mesopotamia’s past. Gailey, C., 1987. Culture Wars: Resistance to State Formation. In, Power Relations and State Formation. T. Patterson and C. Gailey eds, pp. 35–56. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association. This is a significant early statement about the importance of accounting for the reluctance of commoners to participate in the schemes of elite aggrandizers in understanding political processes. Kohl, P., 1981. Materialist Approaches in Prehistory. Annual Review of Anthropology 10: 89–118. This is a straightforward, clear review of the different forms materialism has taken in archaeology with emphasis on Marxist-inspired approaches to the study of the past. Mann, M., 1986. The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This broad overview of human history and the creation of inequality is often cited by archaeologists because of the distinction Mann makes among different sources of power (political, ideological, social, and economic) and the various roles they can play in strategies of elite domination. McGuire, R., 1992. A Marxist Archaeology. New York: Academic Press. McGuire provides a comprehensive and highly readable look at the use of Marxist principles in archaeological interpretation. McGuire, R. and R. Paynter, eds, 1991. The Archaeology of Inequality. Oxford: Blackwell. Contributions to this volume successfully convey how Marxist principles are applied in archaeological interpretations. Miller, D., M. Rowlands, and C. Tilley, eds, 1989. Domination and Resistance. London: Unwin Hyman. Contributors to this influential volume consider the various strategies by which elites seek to achieve power and their erstwhile subordinates maneuver to undermine the pretensions of their “social betters.” The authors, in general, espouse variations of Marxist principles in their interpretations.

322  Suggested Readings O’Laughlin, B., 1975. Marxist Approaches in Anthropology. Annual Review of ­Anthropology. Annual Reviews 4: 341–370. A strong statement of Marxist interpretive principles published when this perspective was finding increasing acceptance among anthropologists in the United States. Paynter, R. and R. McGuire, 1991. The Archaeology of Inequality: Culture, Domination, and Resistance. In, The Archaeology of Inequality. R. McGuire and R. ­Paynter eds, pp. 1–27. Oxford: Blackwell. This is a concise overview of issues relating to the ways in which political centralization is challenged by those in society’s lower echelons. Patterson, T., 2003. Marx’s Ghost: Conversations with Archaeologists. Oxford: Berg. Patterson provides a cogent, insightful consideration of Marx’s influences on archaeology. Price, T. and G. Feinman, eds, 1995. Foundations of Social Inequality. New York: Plenum Press. The authors here express a diverse set of perspectives on how power is manipulated at a variety of spatial scales, from households to states. Rosenswig, R., and J. Cunningham, eds, 2017. Modes of Production and Archaeology. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. The papers in this volume bring to the fore Marx’s notion of modes of production. Modes of production focus on the organization of labor and the generation of surpluses that can be used for political ends. The contributors discuss how this concept can be used to understand ­a rchaeologically-known cultures through time and across the globe. Scott, J., 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New ­Haven: Yale University Press. This is a nuanced account of how peasants resist the demands of their overlords. The book has been very influential in discussions among archaeologists about how free subordinates might have been to question the demands of rulers. Wolf, E., 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolf considers here capitalism’s impact on cultures around the world, highlighting the various spatial and temporal scales over which political economies operate and create the structures that constrain and enable human actions. Though inspired by Marxist principles, the book offers an alternative to Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory Wolf, E., 1990. Facing Power—Old Insights, New Questions. American Anthropologist 92: 586–596. This elegant essay succinctly summarizes the different but interrelated levels of power to which anthropologists and archaeologists might fruitfully pay attention. Theory, World System Algaze, G., 1989. The Uruk Expansion: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Early Mesopotamian Civilization. Current Anthropology 30: 571–608. This article is a clear early exposition of Algaze’s application of world system theory principles to the study of southern Mesopotamian states. Algaze, G., 1993. The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Here Algaze provides a more detailed exposition of his world systems-inspired study of southern Mesopotamian dealings with populations ranged along their margins. Algaze, G., 2008. Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization: The Evolution of an Urban Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In this book Algaze

Suggested Readings  323 specifies how the trade mediated by southern Mesopotamian colonies had transformative effects on the states of southern Mesopotamia. His foci in this publication are: the processes leading to the emergence of cities in southern Mesopotamia; and, the economic and social bases for the dominant role that southern Mesopotamian states played in their dealings with those in northern Mesopotamia. Beaujard, P., 2010. From Three Possible Iron-Age World-Systems to a Single ­A fro-Eurasian World-System. Journal of World History 21(1): 1–43. In a complement to his work on Bronze Age World-Systems, Beaujard proposes that a multi-­ centered system coalesced into a single, large system. He views this as one aspect of cycles of World-System emergence and collapse. Chase-Dunn, C. and T. Hall, eds, 1991. Core-Periphery Relations in Pre-Capitalist Worlds. Boulder, CO.: Westview Press. Though not available to us when we conducted our research in 1988, this volume effectively conveys how applications of world system theory to archaeological cases continued to evolve into the 1990s. Hall, T., N. Kardulias, C. Chase-Dunn, 2011. World Systems Analysis and Archaeology: Continuing the Dialogue. Journal of Archaeological Research 19: 233–279. Kardulias, N. and T. Hall, 2008. Archaeology and World Systems Analysis. World Archaeology 40: 572–583. These last two articles, by some of the leading exponents of world systems analysis in archaeology, powerfully argue that Wallerstein’s original formulation can be successfully modified for use in studying non-capitalist political economies. In doing so they make the important distinction between world systems theory, which is closely tied to the study of capitalist societies, and world systems analysis, which takes principles derived from the former body of ideas and applies them to all other social formations. Kohl, P., 1987. The Use and Abuse of World System Theory: The Case of the Pristine West Asian State. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 11: 1–35. A comprehensive and critical overview of how world systems theory has been applied in archaeology. The article provides a good list of published sources dealing with the topic up through the middle 1980s. Schneider, J., 1977. Was there a Pre-Capitalist World System? Peasant Studies 6: 20–29. This is one of the first attempts to apply world systems theory to anthropological cases. It was instrumental in introducing this theory to archaeologists. Stein, G., 1999. Rethinking World Systems: Diasporas, Colonies, and Interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. This is a thoughtful and thoroughgoing rebuttal of Algaze’s world systems-based approach to the study of relations between southern Mesopotamian states and their northern Mesopotamian neighbors. Wallerstein, I., 1974. The Modern World System Vol. 1. New York: Academic Press. Wallerstein, I., 1980. The Modern World System, Vol. 2. New York: Academic Press. These volumes articulated the basic principles of world systems theory as they applied to modeling the expansion of capitalist economies from the fifteenth century onward. Zagarell, A., 1986. Trade, Women, Class, and Society in Ancient Western Asia. Current Anthropology 27: 415–430. Zagarell considers the effect of political and economic changes on gender relations in late fourth-millennium BC southern Mesopotamia. You might want to compare this more strictly Marxist perspective with Pollock and Bernbeck’s take on the subject.

324  Suggested Readings Wealth, Value, and Power Abrams, E., 1994. How the Maya Built their World: Energetics and Ancient Architecture. Austin: University of Texas Press. In this book, Abrams systematically investigates the question of how much labor would have been required to raise the large constructions found at the lowland Maya center of Copán using technologies available at the time. This experimental approach to analogy is part of an effort to make statements about relations between architectural scale and the power exercised by those who commissioned monumental buildings explicit and testable. Feinman, G, S. Upham, and K. Lightfoot, 1981. The Production Step Measure: An Ordinal Index of Labor Input in Ceramic Manufacture. American Antiquity 46: 871–884. In this article the authors lay out a straightforward means for assessing the value originally attributed to different ceramic vessels based on measuring the number of distinct stages required to fashion them. Hirth, J., 1993. Identifying Rank and Socioeconomic Status in Domestic Contexts: An Example from Central Mexico. In, Prehispanic Domestic Units in Western Mesoamerica. R. Santley and J. Hirth eds, pp. 121–146. Boca Raton: CRC Press. This is a careful consideration of how household wealth can be assessed using archaeological data. Smith, M., 1987. Household Possessions and Wealth in Agrarian States: Implications for Archaeology. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 6: 297–335. This is a much-referenced, succinct review of how wealth differences can be recognized archaeologically. 6 Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory Theory, Crafts Arnold, P., 1991. Domestic Ceramic Production and Spatial Organization: A Mexican Case Study in Ethnoarchaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A detailed and thorough account of how ethnoarchaeology can be used to infer aspects of ceramic production. Bey, G., III and C. Poole, eds, 1992. Ceramic Production and Distribution: An Integrated Approach. G. Bey III and C. Pool eds, pp. 275–313. Boulder: Westview Press. An important collection of essays that defines a systematic approach to linking processes of manufacture, consumption, and distribution within ancient pottery industries. Brumfiel, E. and T. Earle, eds, 1987. Specialization, Exchange, and Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This collection of essays nicely conveys a rich sense of how craft production studies can be integrated within the archaeological examination of ancient political economies. Prestige-goods models are stressed in a number of these contributions. Clark, J. and W. Parry, 1990. Craft Specialization and Cultural Complexity. Economic Anthropology 12: 289–346. A systematic investigation of the ways in which specialized manufacture might figure in ancient political economies. Costin, C., 1991. Craft Specialization: Issues in Defining, Documenting, and Explaining the Organization of Production. In, Archaeological Method and Theory, Volume 3. M. Schiffer ed, pp. 1–56. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. This thorough, insightful review of the craft production literature is still widely cited.

Suggested Readings  325 Costin, C., 2001. Craft Production Systems. In, Archaeology at the Millennium: A Sourcebook. G. Feinman and T. Price eds, pp. 273–327. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. This is an updated version of the author’s 1991 essay that provides a wealth of important references as well as insights into the organization of craft production. Crown, P., 2014. The Archaeology of Crafts Learning: Becoming a Potter in the Puebloan Southwest. Annual Reviews of Anthropology 43: 71–88. This article presents an innovative approach to considering how techniques of craft manufacture are learned and come to constitute, in some cases at least, elements of an artisan’s identity. Lechtman, H., 1977. Style in Technology: Some Early Thoughts. In, Material Culture, Style, Organization, and Dynamics of Technology. H. Lechtman and R. Merrill eds, pp. 3–20. St. Paul, MN and New York: West Publishing. One of the earliest and most influential statements concerning how choices made in technologies of manufacturing items can be culturally constructed. Style, in other words, is not limited to decoration but can be applied to the study of technology. Rice, P., 2006. Pottery Analysis: A Sourcebook. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. This is an essential resource for analyzing pottery making in all periods and world areas. Rice, P., 2009. Late Classic Maya Pottery Production: Review and Synthesis. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 16: 117–156. A succinct overview of what we know about this topic written by the doyenne of the field. Schortman, E. and P. Urban, 2004. Modeling the Roles of Craft Production in Ancient Political Economies. Journal of Archaeological Research 12: 185–226. This take on craft production stresses the various ways specialized manufacture has been understood to function in ancient political economies. The article provides an extensive list of references through the early 2000s that are useful for those who want to investigate the various ways craft production has been understood by archaeologists. Tosi, M., 1984 The Notion of Craft Specialization and its Representation in the Archaeological Records of Early States. In, Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology. M. Spriggs ed., pp. 22–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This is an important Marxist treatment of how craft production might have figured in ancient political economies. Urban, P., M. Ausec, and C. Wells, 1997. The Fires Without and the Fires Within: Evidence for Ceramic Production Facilities at the Late Classic Site of La Sierra, Naco Valley, Northwestern Honduras, and in its Environs. In, The Prehistory and History of Ceramic Kilns. P. Rice ed., pp. 173–194. Westerville: The American Ceramics Society, This article summarizes our understanding, as of 1996, of the structure of pottery production in the Late and Terminal Classic Naco Valley. Varma, S. and J. Menon, 2017. Households at Work: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Variation in Ceramic Production in North India. Ethnoarchaeology 9: 3–29. A very detailed and thorough example of how investigations conducted within middle range theory, in this case the study of modern potters, can inform reconstructions of ceramic production in archaeological contexts. Wailes, B., ed., 1996. Craft Specialization and Social Evolution: In Memory of V. Gordon Childe. Philadelphia: The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania. The essays included here provide a very useful review of the various ways craft production may have been integrated within the political economies of a wide array of ancient societies.

326  Suggested Readings Theory, Prestige Goods and Exchange D’Altroy, T. and T. Earle, 1985. Staple Finance, Wealth Finance, and Staple Storage in the Inka Political Economy. Current Anthropology 26: 187–206. The concept of “wealth finance” discussed here closely parallels the idea of prestige goods in both the nature of the items involved and their use in political strategies of domination. Ekholm, K., 1972. Power and Prestige: The Rise and Fall of the Kongo Kingdom. Uppsala: SKRIV Service AB. This is one of the earliest, most comprehensive summaries of prestige goods theory. Friedman, J. and M. Rowlands, 1977. Notes towards an Epigenetic Model of the Evolution of Civilization. In, The Evolution of Social Systems. J. Friedman and M. Rowlands eds, pp. 201–276. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. This essay includes a detailed exposition of prestige goods theory. Mauss, M., 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. Originally published in French in 1950 and in English in 1954, this book remains a touchstone for anthropologists who are studying the social significance of goods exchange. Meillassoux, C., 1981. Maidens, Meals, and Money. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This book provides a clear example, and one of the most influential early applications, of prestige goods theory in anthropology. Oka, R., and C. Kusimba, 2009. The Archaeology of Trading Systems, Part 1: Towards a New Trade Synthesis. Journal of Archaeological Research 16: 339–395. The authors believe that trade is one of the principal mechanisms uniting societies across space and time. They reject single-cause models for trade, and instead a­ dvocate for multi-pronged approaches. They point out the problems inherent in trying to extricate trade, or any other economic activity, from the rest of culture, noting that economic processes are inherent in religion, ideology, power contests, and so forth. Shennan, S., 1982. Exchange and Ranking: The Role of Amber in the Early Bronze Age of Europe. In, Ranking, Resources, and Exchange. C. Renfrew and S. ­Shennan eds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 33–45. Referred to here as “prestige good ranking systems,” this article lays out important precepts of prestige goods theory. Naco Valley Connell, S., 2002. Getting Closer to the Source: Using Ethnoarchaeology to Find Ancient Pottery Making in the Naco Valley, Honduras. Latin American Antiquity 13: 401–417. This article reports on Connell’s research into modern pottery making processes in the Naco Valley. 7 Practicing Power over Time Theory, Practice Bourdieu, P., 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This is one of the foundational texts of practice theory. You might try reading the Ortner article (see below) first as it will help you decode some of Bourdieu’s more complexly phrased arguments. Pay special attention to the idea of habitus outlined here; it roughly translates as Bourdieu’s version of “strategy” discussed in this chapter.

Suggested Readings  327 Dobres, M. and J. Robb, eds, 2000. Agency in Archaeology. London: Routledge. This is an influential collection of essays that conveys a good sense of how the concept of agency, or a person’s ability to make and act on choices, has been incorporated in archaeological research. Dornan, J., 2002. Agency and Archaeology: Past, Present, and Future Directions. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 9, 303–329. A very good overview of agency theory in archaeology. Giddens, A., 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Another seminal text that sets the foundation for practice theory. Giddens’ ideas are similar to those of Bourdieu but he arrives at them from a very different basis. We were especially influenced by the ways in which Giddens integrates the concepts of resources and rules into his understanding of human interaction. Ortner, S., 1984. Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26: 126–166. This is a much-cited overview of changes in anthropological thought during a crucial interval. The essay also provides a clear introduction to practice theory. Sewell, W., 1992. A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. American Journal of Sociology 98: 1–29. This insightful critique of Giddens’ theory of structuration stresses the importance of resources in understanding the relationship between structure and agency. Heterarchy Crumley, C., 1979. Three Locational Models: An Epistemological Assessment of Anthropology and Archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 2: 141–173. The original statement of the important concept of heterarchy. See Ehrenreich et al., 1995, below for examples of heterarchy’s application to particular research cases. Ehrenreich, R., C. Crumley, and J. Levy, eds, 1995. Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies. Arlington: Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, No. 6. C. Crumley’s introductory essay succinctly defines heterarchy while the subsequent articles explore different ways this important concept can be employed in archaeological analyses. Naco Valley Schortman, E. and P. Urban, 2001. Politics with Style: Identity Formation in Prehispanic Southeastern Mesoamerica. American Anthropologist 103: 1–19. In this essay we elaborate our ideas about relations among social identities, social networks, political centralization, and the material means by which these phenomena are linked. Schortman, E. and P. Urban, 2012. Enacting Power through Networks. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 31: 500–514. In this article we summarize the results of excavations conducted at Sites 175, 470, and 471 in the Naco Valley. It was these investigations that helped us to understand some of the ways that Terminal Classic populations in the valley might have used craft production to preserve some level of economic and political autonomy. Urban, P. and E. Schortman, 2004. Opportunities for Advancement: Intra-­ Community Power Contests in the Midst of Political Decentralization in Terminal

328  Suggested Readings Classic Southeastern Mesoamerica. Latin American Antiquity 15: 251–272. This paper applies some of the ideas concerning changing political arrangements discussed in the present chapter to the study of Site 128. Networks Barabási, A-L., 2009. Scale-free Networks: A Decade and Beyond. Science V 325: 412–413. In the late 1990s researchers interested in networks discovered that no matter the age, function, or scope of complex networked systems, they converged towards similar architectures. This convergence has been named scale-free networks, and its discovery has catalyzed the expansion of network analysis across disciplines. Borgatti, S., A. Mehra, D. Brass, and G. Labianca, 2009. Network Analysis in the Social Sciences. Science 223: 892–895. Social network analysis (SNA) has proven to be a boon to social scientists, allowing them to graph a multitude of social forms. This review covers developments to date, and suggests how social and physical scientists can come together by using network analysis. Brughmans, T., 2010. Connecting the Dots: Towards Archaeological Network Analysis. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 29(3): 277–303. This survey of networks in archaeology asks several important questions: what kind of networks are most useful for archaeology; how do we use archaeological data in network analysis; can there be a purely archaeological form of networks; and how can quantitative methods be combined with networks? The case study looks at Roman tablewares in the eastern Mediterranean. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2015. The Connected Past: Critical and Innovative Approaches to Networks in Archaeology. A special edition focusing on network analyses. The authors and their foci are: Collar, Coward, Brughmans, and Mills, who provide a thorough introduction covering not just the articles, but the development and use of network ideas in archaeology; Östborn and Gerding, discussing the distribution of Hellenistic fired brick around the Mediterranean; Mol, Hoogland and Hoffman, looking at the place of Saby Island within its archipelago in the Caribbean; Graham and Weingert on Roman brick dissemination; Gjesfjeld looking at two temporally distinct networks on Kuril Island in NE Asia; ­Crabtree on food distribution in the Puebloan Southwest; Golitko and Feinman, who examine Mesoamerican obsidian distribution over the Late to Terminal Classic periods; Brughmans, Key, and Earl, examining the intervisibility of Spanish sites in the Iron Age and Roman periods; and Bork, Mills, Peeples, and Clark, presenting ideas about depopulations and persistence in the ancient American Southwest. Mills, B., 2017. Social Network Analysis in Archaeology. Annual Review of Archaeology 46: 379–397. Networks are relational: the actors—or node in a network—are connected by social relations—the edges in a graph. Social network analysis (SNA) can be part of studies done with a number of theoretical perspectives. The author urges archaeologists to use SNA to develop ways of combining SNA with theory, and applying it to a variety of spatial and temporal situations. Mills, B., M. Peeples, W. R. Hass, Jr., L. Bork, J. Clark, and J. Roberts, Jr., 2009. Multiscalar Perspectives on Social Networks in the Late Prehispanic Southwest. American Antiquity 80(1): 3–24. Focusing on the period from 1200–1450 CE/ AD, the authors employ social network analysis (SNA) and Geographic Information Systems to understand the changes wrought by migration and general demographic upheaval. SNA is applied at multiples spatial scales: micro, individual

Suggested Readings  329 valleys; meso, the southern part of the American Southwest; and macro, the part of the Southwest lying in Arizona and New Mexico. The era considered is divided into 50-year units, serving as a temporal scale. The relational aspects of SNA shed light on the innovations, particularly in religion, but seen also in a wide variety of materials, following the tumult of migrations. 8 Identity Identity, General Insoll, T., ed., 2007. The Archaeology of Identity: A Reader. London: Routledge. This comprehensive volume has discussions of ethnicity, gender, age, ability embodiment, and power relations, and more. The list of authors is virtually a who’s who of early twenty-first century archaeology: Alberti, Anderson, Brück, Brumfiel, Coningham, Cross, Fenton, Hays-Gilpin, S. Jones, R. Joyce, Meskell, Rowlands, S­ ofaer, J. Thomas, Voss, Waldron, Wylie, and Young. It’s a good place to start for an understanding of these issues as of the early 2000s, and for bibliographic guidance. Gender, Feminism, and Identity Blackmore, C., 2011. How to Queer the Past Without Sex: Queer Theory, Feminisms and the Archaeology of Identity. Archaeologies 7(1): 75–96. Written by a leading young scholar in gender and queer theory, the article discusses the meaning of “queering theory.” She points out that this focus is not about finding homosexualities in the past, but rather about looking at multiple facets of identity. The relationship of queer theory to feminist theory is discussed, and then the author looks at Maya commoners in light of her perspective. Conkey, M. and J. Gero, 1997. Programme to Practice: Gender and Feminism in Archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 411–437. An important early review of the varied ways that gender issues impinge on archaeology and archaeologists and how the topic is approached by researchers. Franklin, M., 2001. A Black Feminist-inspired Archaeology? Journal of Social Archaeology V 1(1): 108–125. The growth of historical archaeology in the US is closely tied to studying Black Americans from colonial times through the Civil War. The author notes that despite a focus on Black experiences, Black feminist theory is seldom used by historical archaeologists. Furthermore, one need not be either Black or a woman to grasp and use this body of theory. She recommends taking Black feminist thought out of the margins, and making it central to American historical archaeology. Geller, P. and M. Stockett, eds, 2006. Feminist Anthropology: Past, Present, and Future. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. This is a comprehensive overview of feminist theory in anthropology in general. The volume not only deals with applications of feminist perspectives to research but analyzes current academic practices from this viewpoint. Hays-Gilpin, K., 2000. Feminist Scholarship in Archaeology. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 571: 89–106. This is a concise summary of feminist approaches in archaeology as of the end of the twentieth century. Much of the current discussion of social identities in archaeology is inspired by feminist studies and this is a good source to consult as you try to understand relations between gender and affiliation.

330  Suggested Readings Joyce, R., 1993. Women’s Work: Images of Production and Reproduction in Pre-Hispanic Southern Central America. Current Anthropology 34: 255–274. This is a provocative study of gender as revealed in the archaeological record of Southeast and Southern Mesoamerica. Nelson, S., 1997. Gender in Archaeology. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. A very good review of gender issues in archaeology as of the mid-1990s. Though originally emphasized in interpretivist circles, gender is increasingly a topic pursued by members of most archaeological schools. Wilkie, L., and K. Howlett Hayes, 2006. Engendered and Feminist Archaeologies of the Recent and Documented Pasts. Journal of Archaeological Research 14: ­243–264. In historical and prehistoric archaeology, approaches focusing on gender and feminism have developed in parallel. Nonetheless, historical archaeologists have sources that prehistoric specialists do not: documents. The authors discuss the relationships between texts and material items, some of the conceptual issues inherent in historical work on gender, and how feminist theory and practice can have a positive impact on research and the field. World Archaeology Vol. 32(2), 2000. This volume, edited by Thomas Dawson, examines queer perspectives in archaeology. Issues covered include cultural heritage and management, the nature of “family,” embodiment, studying sexuality in the past, and ontology. Places and times range from dynastic Egypt to the twentieth century in the UK. 9 Looking at Meaning: Semiotics Interpretivism, General Hegmon, M., 2003. Setting Theoretical Egos Aside: Issues and Theory in North American Archaeology. American Antiquity 68: 213–243. This is an excellent review of general issues in archaeological theory couched in a discussion of how these concerns play out in the study of North American prehistory. Hegmon’s discussion of “processual-plus” approaches to interpreting the past nicely highlights cross-fertilization among different schools of thought. Hodder, I., 1990. The Domestication of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell. This book provides a classic account, from an interpretivist viewpoint, of plant and animal domestication in Neolithic Europe. Hodder, I., 1992. Theory and Practice in Archaeology. New York: Routledge. This collection of essays outlines the relation between data and theory understood as a “hermeneutic spiral.” Hodder’s argument is founded on an interpretivist approach to understanding prehistory and he contrasts this with the hypothesis-testing model usually associated with processualism. Hodder’s Chapter 15 presents a particularly clear example of his approach. Hodder, I., ed., 1982. Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. These essays translate the ethnographic concern with symbols and their importance in guiding human behavior to the study of archaeological contexts. Hodder, I., ed., 2001. Archaeological Theory Today. Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press. The essays in this compendium outline different perspectives on archaeological theory as these existed in 2001. This volume provides a very useful review of archaeological theory, especially strong on interpretivist approaches. Hodder, I., ed. 2006. The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük. New York: Thames and Hudson. This engagingly written account summarizes the

Suggested Readings  331 interpretations of Hodder and his colleagues concerning life within the Neolithic community of Çatalhöyük. The volume provides a good sense of how interpretivist principles can be applied to the study of prehistoric contexts. Hodder, I. and S. Hutson, 2003. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, 3rd ed, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This overview of archaeological theory stresses the importance of agency and meaning in understanding the past as well as the distinctiveness of each culture. Hodder, I., M. Shanks, A. Alexandri, V. Buchli, J. Carman, J. Last, and G. Lucas, eds, 1995. Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past. London: Routledge. This influential collection of essays provides a good sense of the varied ways Interpretivists go about understanding the past. Joyce, R., 2002. The Languages of Archaeology: Dialogue, Narrative, and Writing. ­Oxford: Blackwell. This is an important contribution to the literature on the complex ways in which theory, data, and the reporting of both are interrelated. Moss, M., 2003. Rifts in the Theoretical Landscape of Archaeology in the United States: A Comment on Hegmon and Watkins. American Antiquity V 70(3): 561–587. Responding to Hegmon’s and Watkins’ article (listed in this section) this author addresses problems she sees with how these writers characterize North American archaeology. She points out that Hegmon, in particular, does not consider Cultural Resource Management, a way of doing archaeology that differs from Hegemon’s academic perspective. She takes issue with Hegmon’s idea of processual-plus, and points out that feminist, Marxist, and post-colonial approaches do not nest well within processual-plus, in part because these three, among others, are concerned not just with archaeology per se, but with social issues in contemporary society. Preucel, R., 1995. The Postprocessual Condition. Journal of Archaeological Research 3: 147–175. Preucel’s essay is a much-cited synopsis of interpretivist archaeology. Preucel, R., ed., 1991. Processual and Postprocessual Archaeologies: Multiple Ways of Knowing the Past. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Papers No. 10. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. This volume captures the processual/interpretivist debate when it was at its most vibrant. The essay by Ian Hodder (Chapter 3) nicely summarizes the latter stance. Roseneau, P., 1992. Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Roseneau provides a very readable, clear account of Postmodernist writings as they apply to the social sciences generally. Watkins, J., 2003. Beyond the Margin: American Indians, First Nations, and ­A rchaeology in North America American Antiquity 68(2): 273–275. In this companion piece to Hegmon’s and Moss’ articles, Watkins outlines indigenous North American ideas about archaeology, and how these perspectives can, and should be, incorporated into archaeological practice. Whitley, David S., ed., 1998. Reader in Archaeological Theory: Postprocessual and Cognitive Approaches. London: Routledge. This is a very helpful compendium of essays written in the 1980s and 1990s dealing with developments in archaeological theory, especially Interpretivist approaches to understanding the past. Semiotics and Meaning Bauer, A., 2002. Symbols and Semiotics: Is What You See All You Get? Recognizing Meaning in Archaeology. Journal of Social Archaeology 2(1): 37–52. Looking at

332  Suggested Readings Saussurean and Peircean semiotics, Bauer concludes that Peirce’s approach offers more to archaeology than does that of Saussure. He applies his insights to how people interpret the symbolic content of artifacts in museum displays. Hutson, S., A. Magnoni, and T. Stanton, 2012. “All That Is Solid…”: Sacbes, Settlement, and Semiotics at Tzacauil, Yucatan Ancient Mesoamerica 23: 297–311. In this article, which is the basis for the example used in the text, the authors look at the construction of raised walkways at the site of Tzacauil. They conclude that a semiotic approach provides a fruitful way to think about the Tzacauil data. Johnson, M., 2012. Phenomenological Approaches in Landscape Archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 269–284. For at least the last two decades, examining landscapes through the lens of phenomenology has been popular. Nevertheless, the viewpoint has elicited strong criticisms, particularly of its subjective aspects. After reviewing these points, the author concludes that ancient experiences will continue to interest archaeologists, even though the phenomenological approach may not remain at the forefront. Jones, A., 2006 Animated Images: Images, Agency and Landscape in Kilmartin, Argyll, Scotland. Journal of Material Culture V 11(1–2): 211–225. Rock art has become one of the focal areas for applying semiotic approaches, and in this article, the author examines such art in one of the densest areas for a wide variety of Neolithic constructions in Scotland. He concludes that Peircean semiotics provides a more cogent understanding of this material than does Saussurean thought. Lele, V., 2006. Material Habits, Identity, Semeiotic. Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1): 48–70. Lele discusses the potential importance of Peirce for discussions of identity, and extends this consideration to how Peircean semiotics can be useful to the archaeological study of materiality. The case study includes both ethnographic and archaeological work in Ireland. Lele also provides a thorough presentation of Peirce’s ideas. Preucel, R., 2006. Archaeological Semiotics. Malden: Blackwell. In this thorough and foundational work, Preucel explains the semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure and those of Charles Peirce. He contrasts the two theories, and discusses how Peirce’s views are more useful for archaeology than are those of de Saussure. He concludes with examples from his work in North American archaeology. The book can be dense but is well worth the effort. Robb, J., 1998. The Archaeology of Symbols. Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 329– 346. This is a comprehensive account of different archaeological approaches to the study of symbols. Since Robb wrote, symbolic approaches have proliferated, but nonetheless, the article is foundational for understanding the basics of symbolic archaeology. 10 Phenomenology and Experience Barrett, J., and I. Ko, 2009. A Phenomenology of Landscape: A Crisis in British Landscape Archeology? Journal of Social Archaeology 9(3): 275–294. The landscape work done by Christopher Tilley has been criticized for its non-replicability: other investigators have not seen what Tilley claims to have seen in landscapes with Neolithic monuments. The authors move on from that observation to a discussion of what Tilley says is his theoretical grounding: the phenomenology of Heidegger. Heidegger postulates that we come to know the world by being in it; we have no pre-existing conceptual apparatus, but rather develop concepts from experience.

Suggested Readings  333 In Barrett and Ko’s reading of Tilley’s work prior to 2005, they see him as diverging from Heidegger’s view. He seems to say that subjects do have prior conceptual points of view, and these are what moved Neolithic builders. Brück, J., 2005. Experiencing the Past? The Development of a Phenomenological Archaeology in British Prehistory. Archaeological Dialogues 12(1): 45–72. A comprehensive review covering phenomenology and its application by UK archaeologists. In addition to discussing the positive aspects of a phenomenological perspective, such as countering structural dualisms, the author points out problems with the approach, and makes suggestions for how archaeologists might improve phenomenological analysis. Mongelluzo, R., 2013. Maya Palaces as Experiences: Ancient Maya Royal Architecture and its Influence on Sensory Perception. In, Making Senses of the Past. J. Day, ed., pp 90–114. Carbondale, Il.: Southern Illinois University Press. Maya palaces have similar architecture across Late Classic sites. The author discusses how spaces and views in palaces related to elite perceptions of the world. Rahmeier, C., 2012. Materiality, Social Roles, and the Senses: Domestic Landscape and Social Identity in the Estâncias of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Journal of Material Culture 17(2): 153–171. Estancias—cattle ranches—were composed of a number of social groups: the owners, supervisors, slaves, and indigenous, itinerant men who worked the cattle. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty, the author discusses their sensory experiences and how these shaped their perceptions. Tarlow, S., 2012. The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 169–85. Studying emotions is new to archaeology, and as the author points out, the literature on this topic is scant. Nevertheless, Tarlow sees this as an important way to look at antiquity. Her approach to the study of emotions is twofold: those of past peoples, and those of the archaeologist doing the research. These should not be confused. In addition, Tarlow suggests that it would be fruitful to look at group responses rather than focus on individual, idiosyncratic emotions. Christopher Tilley is one of the original scholars who applied phenomenology to archaeology. The works listed below, both by him alone and with collaborators, trace the development of his thought as he applied it to Neolithic monuments and other British locales. Tilley, C., 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape. Oxford: Berg. Tilley, C., 2005. Phenomenological Archaeology. In, Archaeology: The Key Concepts. C. Renfrew and P. Bahn, eds, pp 201–207. London: Routledge. Tilley, C., 2010. Interpreting the Landscape. Explorations in Landscape Archaeology series, 3.Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Tilley, C., 2016. Interpreting Landscapes: Geologies, Topographies, Identities. Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology Series. London: Routledge. Tilley, C. and W. Bennett, 2008. Body and Image: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2. London: Routledge. This extended examination of Neolithic monuments, specifically rock art, looks at the physical dimensions of experience. How do viewers move towards and away from the images? What aspects of the landscape assist easy movement, or limit how people can access the sites? The authors take the point of view that interpreting images requires understanding of the bodily experiences of past and present viewers. Tilley, C., and K. Cameron-Daum, 2017. An Anthropology of Landscape. London: UCL Press. In this recent book, the authors take on a heathland in southwestern

334  Suggested Readings England. They pursue phenomenological themes, such as emotional response and embodiment, and look at the area from the point of view of managers (e.g., quarry operators, archaeologists, environmentalists) and users (e.g., artists, cyclists, walkers). The varied managers and users also contest the landscape, a matter covered in the work. 11 New Materiality Assemblages, Bundles, Entanglements Busacca, G., 2017. Places of Encounter: Relational Ontologies, Animal Depiction and Ritual Performance at Göbekli Tepe. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27(2): 313–330. The animal images at the Turkish Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe have excited much interest. The depictions are generally seen as non-human, predatory, and male. The author argues that applying new animism to image analysis elucidates aspects of the site never before articulated. Cambridge Archeological Journal, 2017. Special section, 27 (1): This edition of the journal presents authors concerned with assemblage theory. Some of the most compelling material deals with reconciling the current meaning of “assemblage” with older uses, the relationship of typological classification to assemblages, temporal dimensions of assemblages, and how assemblages can help us to analyze materials at multiple temporal and spatial scales. The latter is particularly important for discussing change, and relating microscale change to broader currents of historical change. Crellin, R., 2017. Changing Assemblages: Vibrant Matter in Burial Assemblages. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27: 111–125. The author argues for an approach to studying the past that seeks explanations for events in the complex, shifting relations among elements of assemblages. Assemblages in this sense are composed of heterogenous mixes of people and things, their significance in ever-unfolding processes of culture change lying in their dynamic relations. Like Jervis, Robb, and van der Veen, Crellin is arguing that shifts in these connections, whether initiated by people or things, intentionally or inadvertently, are what we should attend to in explaining changes operating at multiple spatial and temporal scales. There are, therefore, no prime movers like population growth or the search for power. Instead, causation emerges from the interactions among all parts of an assemblage. Fowler, C. and O. Harris, 2015. Enduring Relations: Exploring a Paradox of New Materialism. Journal of Material Culture 20(2): 127–148. How can archaeologist understand a monumental construction such as the West Kennett Long Barrow, the spatio-temporal-material focus of this article? The authors argue that seeing an entity as either an assemblage or a thing-in-itself limits our interpretations. They point out that assemblage and thing approaches are not contradictory, but instead can be united in our studies because both focus on relationships. Depending on the question asked, one or the other way can be more useful than the other. We need not choose, rather, both can be combined. Henry, E., 2017. Building Bundles, Building Memories: Processes of Remembering in Adena-Hopewell Societies of Eastern North America. Journal of Archaeological Method Theory V 24: 188–228. Henry bases his work on the relational aspects of American Indian ontologies, an approach that is increasingly intriguing for archaeologists. In particular, he looks at the Native North American idea of bundles; these contain objects and in a sense also include social relations and memories.

Suggested Readings  335 Jervis, B., 2016. Assemblage Theory and Town Foundation in Medieval England. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 26: 381–395. Drawing on assemblage theory, Jervis argues that Medieval towns in what is now Sussex, England should be understood less as distinct judicial and economic entities and more as bundles of social relations. All places, in fact, are best seen as products of performances situated in time and involving the people and things that comprise an assemblage distinctive of those places. Going further, every settlement is enmeshed in relations with a great many others at varying distances, each of these assemblages being shaped through these connections. Robb, J., 2013. Material Culture, Landscape of Action and Emergent Causation: A New Model for the Origins of the European Neolithic. Current Anthropology 54: 657–683. Rather than specifying primary causes (e.g., population growth) for the appearance of domestication in Neolithic Europe, Robb argues that this process came about as the result of human–thing entanglements. People gradually created a world of objects (the “landscapes of action” in the title), including domesticates. Their engagement with these things gradually narrowed their choices of what next steps to take in processes of culture change. Human–thing transactions thus channeled our history in ways we never intended. van der Veen, M., 2014. The Materiality of Plants: Plant-People Entanglements. World Archaeology 46: 799–812. The author argues for understanding domestication and its many consequences as the results of plant–human interactions in which all parties exercised some degree of agency. As in Robb’s essay, causation does not proceed in a straightforward manner. Instead, the ever more complex relations among farmers and their crops come to constitute meshworks composed of interdependencies that condition, if they do not absolutely determine, the course of cultural change. In the process, the significance of any meshwork component in understanding culture change depends less on its individual properties and more on its relations to other components. Wright, M., and J. Lemos, 2018. Embodied Signs: Reading Gesture and Posture in Classic Maya Dance. Latin American Antiquity 28(2): 368–385. Images of dancing are common in Maya art. Combining Peircean semiotics and Labanotation (a way of recording movement in dance), this article parses Classic period dance and discusses it in terms of indexical and iconic signs. Zedeño, M., 2008. Bundled Worlds: The Roles and Interactions of Complex Objects from the North American Plains. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 15(4): 362–378. One of the difficulties in tying older approaches to the newer one of materiality is what to do with the archaeological preoccupation with typologies and classifications. The author makes the case that classifications are still essential to make sense of the wide variety of items included in bundles. Her case study is bundles prepared by Native American Blackfoot people. Indigenous Approaches, Multiple Ontologies, and Collaborative Practice Atalay, S., 2006. Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice. American Indian Quarterly V 30(3&4): 280–310. Archaeological practice is not just about producing knowledge about the past; rather it is part of living groups’ history and heritage. Given this, how can and should non-indigenous and indigenous people come together in order to look at the past? Atalay (Ojibwe) has many suggestions,

336  Suggested Readings beginning with non-indigenous researchers fully acknowledging the genesis of archaeology within colonial enterprises. She then discusses issues of world view and non-western ontologies, dissemination of knowledge, community engagement as collaborators in research, and how lessons from North America and Australia can inform the practices of archaeologists world-wide. Her wide-ranging paper is foundational for an understanding of what indigenous archaeology means and what it can accomplish. Atalay, S., 2007. Global Application of Indigenous Archaeology: Community Based Participatory Research in Turkey. Archaeologies V 3(3): 249–270. Sonja Atalay (Ojibwe) asks whether or not indigenous archaeological approaches offer anything to researchers working in areas where current residents do not recognize connections to the distant past. Based on her work in Turkey, she proposes that an indigenously-informed archaeology, including as it does community engagement and collaboration, benefits all stakeholders in any part of the world. Acabado, S., M. Martin, and F. Datar, 2017. Ifugao Archaeology: Collaborative and Indigenous Archaeology in the Northern Philippines. Advances in Archaeological Practice 5(1): 1–11. The authors discuss a recent project in the Ifugao region of the Philippines. Their results, that terracing for wet-rice agriculture began when the Spanish reached the islands, is in conflict with Ifugao tradition which says that the technique is approximately 2,000 years old. By including Ifugao stakeholders as active participants in research, these indigenous people and archaeologists have come to an understanding of how research can be carried out that is consonant with the interests and sensibilities of both groups. McNiven, I., 2016. Theoretical Challenges of Indigenous Archaeology: Setting an Agenda. American Antiquity 81(1): 27–41. While indigenous archaeologies have had an impact on archaeological practice, to what degree has archaeological theory been influenced by indigenous thought? The author suggests that some indigenous perspectives have penetrated theory—for example, the acknowledgement of multiple ontologies by some researchers—but much work needs to be done fully to incorporate indigenous world views. Schmidt, P., 2017. Peter Ucko Memorial Lecture, Decolonizing Archaeological Practice: Gazing Into the Past to Transform the Future. Archaeologies 13(3): 392– 411. Archaeology done in Africa labors under a heavy burden of colonial practice and thought, despite movement towards indigenous collaboration in other world areas, particularly North America and Australia. Schmidt discusses the general issues pertaining to change in Africa, and recounts his own work with the Haya peoples of East Africa, which incorporates their oral traditions and collaborative research practices. Watkins, J., 2000. Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Watkins, himself of Native descent, discusses a variety of issues related to indigenous archaeology: ethics, laws about resource protection, and repatriation legislation. He provides four case studies from North America, and a chapter on global indigenous perspectives. Latour, Actor-Network Theory Alberti, B., 2016. Archaeologies of Ontology. Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 163– 179. Both Latour and Viveiros de Castro have influenced ontological approaches in

Suggested Readings  337 archaeology. The author contrasts their influence, concluding that their work and projects inspired by them can be united by the concept of alterity. Martin, A., 2005. Agents in Inter-Action: Bruno Latour and Agency. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12(4): 283–312. Archaeologists have found inspiration in Latour’s call to follow the things. Yet the ways he and archaeologists look at materials differ. Martin first reviews Latour’s work relating to agency and methodologies for studying it, and then applies the insights he derives from Latour to a case study of burial mounds pertaining to the Lower Illinois Valley Hopewell. Sayes, E., 2014. Actor-Network theory and Methodology: Just What Does It Mean to Say that Nonhumans Have Agency? Social Studies of Science V 44(1): 134–149. The author, a sociologist, questions ideas about material agency derived from Latour’s work. He reviews statement from a variety of thinkers in hopes that once we understand these positions, we will be better able to decide on the utility of Actor-Network theory. van Oyen, A., 2015. Actor-Network Theory’s Take on Archaeological Types: Becoming, Material Agency and Historical Explanation. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 25(1): 63–78. Bruno Latour’s work on agency and networks has inspired much work in recent archeology. The author points out that his original work arose from ethnographic studies of how scientists work in laboratory settings, and how the facts they advance are constructed and stabilized, and then become accepted categories with implications for universality. Van Oyen argues that the same process occurs with types in archaeology: they are constructed, and eventually are seen as static categories. If we, however, see types as manifesting agency, rather than static categories, the typologies will continue to be valuable in the discipline. New Animism, Flat and Relational Ontologies, Symmetrical Archaeology Alberti, B., S. Fowles, M. Holbraad, Y. Marshall, and C. Witmore. 2011. “Worlds Otherwise”: Archaeology, Anthropology, and Ontological Difference. Current Anthropology V 52(6): 896. In an unusual format—a dialogue amongst 5 authors—­this article shows the variety of ways archaeologists and anthropologists conceive of and use the concept of ontology. The conversation is spirited and informative. Fowles, S., 2010. The Southwest School of Landscape Archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 453–468. The American Southwest has a long history of work by both archaeologists and cultural anthropologists. With increasing participation by Native peoples in the area, a distinct tradition of landscape archaeology is developing which stands in contrast to other ways of discussing landscape, particularly the UK tradition. Shanks, M., 2008. Symmetrical archaeology. World Archaeology 39(4): 589–596. Archaeology’s concern with symmetrical approaches to the past is not new, although in recent years it has come to the fore of theory. This article reviews the development of symmetrical archaeology since the 1960s, with a stress on how the adoption of a symmetrical view can remove from archaeology the weight of outmoded dualities. These dualities include such pairings as nature–culture, male–female, animals–humans, but also include ideas about the relationship of the past to the contemporary people who study it.

338  Suggested Readings Webmoor, T., 2007. What About “One More Turn After the Social” in Archaeological Reasoning? Taking Things Seriously. Archaeology 39(4): 563–578. A classic account of symmetrical archaeology and multiple ontologies. Weismantel, M., 2015. Seeing Like an Archaeologist: Viveiros de Castro at Chavín de Huantar. Journal of Social Archaeology V 15(2): 139–159. Sculptures at the Peruvian site of Chavín have offered interpretive challenges since their discovery. Here, the author applies the idea of perspectivism—essentially that there are multiple ways of looking at the world, also discussed as multiple ontologies—to this site. The discussion of Brazilian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro’s work and its relationship to neo-shamanism and multiple ontologies is covered. Whitmore, C., 2007. Symmetrical Archaeology: Excerpts of a Manifesto. World Archaeology 39(4): 546–562. At a time that he sees as somewhat chaotic for archaeological theory, Whitmore offers a programmatic overview of what he considers the most promising direction for our field: adoption of a symmetrical view. He believes that this view, not just of objects and people in the past, but of archaeological practice, and the ways we transform the data we acquire into accounts of the past, will not and should not serve as an overarching paradigm, but rather as a gathering point for discussion, interpretation, and change in the discipline. 12 Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia Mesopotamia, General Discussions Liverani, M., 2006. Uruk: The First City. Z. Bahrani and M. Van De Mieroop, trans. Equinox Publishing Ltd. In this compact book, the origins of what seems to be the world’s first city, and likely the first city-state, are covered. In the tradition of V. Gordon Childe, the author treats the transition of cities and states as a true revolution, not explainable by processual theory alone. Lloyd, S., 1980. Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Exploration. London: Thames and Hudson. A fine overview of nineteenth-century research in southern Mesopotamia. The book is strong on the personalities and political intrigues involved in this work. You might want to pay attention to how Seton characterizes settlement studies at the end of the book. Matthews, R., 2013. The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: Theories and Approaches. London: Taylor and Francis. Beginning with an overview of the ideas governing Mesopotamian research since the nineteenth century, the work also covers the methods used in different periods. Temporal coverage ranges from early farming through the first states to the origins of empires. Designed as a textbook, this will nonetheless interest a variety of readers. Rothman, M., 2004. Studying the Development of Complex Society: Mesopotamia in the Late Fifth and Fourth Millennia BC. Journal of Archaeological Research 12: 75–119. Rothman provides a thoroughgoing and clear review of shifting theoretical perspectives on southern Mesopotamian prehistory. Van De Mieroop, M., 2003. A History of the Ancient Near East. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. As the title suggests, this work is a narrative history of Near Eastern Antiquity. Its coverage is thorough, and it appeals to a wide range of readers. In addition, the Human Relations Area Files have selections of documents concerning research in Mesopotamia. The organization is by temporal period, for example, Uruk or Jemdet Nasr, and most collections can be found by searching for Robert McC. Adams.

Suggested Readings  339 Mesopotamia, Processual Approaches Adams, R. McC., 1965. The Land Behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Adams, R. McC., 1966. The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and ­Prehispanic Mexico. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Adams, R. McC., 1981. Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use of the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Adams, R. McC. and H. Nissen, 1972. Uruk Countryside: Natural Setting of Urban Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. These four sources will give you a good sense of Adams’ approach to the study of the state in southern Mesopotamia and in comparative perspective. They also provide insights into the centrality of settlement survey to Adams’ theoretical work. Wilkinson, T., 2000. Regional Approaches to Mesopotamian Archaeology: The  Contribution of Archaeological Surveys. Journal of Archaeological Research 8(3): 219–269. Settlement survey is fundamental to Mesopotamian archaeology. Here the author reviews previous survey work and looks at changes in settlement ­patterns from the Bronze Age through the Iron Age. Wright, H., 1972. A Consideration of Interregional Exchange in Greater Mesopotamia: 4000–3000 BC. In, Social Exchange and Interaction. E. Wilmsen ed., pp. 95–105. Ann Arbor: Anthropological Papers, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, No. 46. An excellent example of one of the ways in which trade was being used to explain the appearance of cultural complexity. Wright, H. and G. Johnson, 1975. Population, Exchange, and Early State Formation in Southwestern Iran. American Anthropologist 77: 267–289. This processualist account of early state formation in southern Mesopotamia builds on, but differs from, Adams’ work. Mesopotamia, Marxist Approaches Diakonoff, I. M., 1969. The Rise of the Despotic State in Ancient Mesopotamia. In, Ancient Mesopotamia: Socio-Economic History, a Collection of Studies by Soviet Scholars. I. M. Diakonoff ed., pp. 173–203. Moscow: “NAUKA” Publishing House, ­Central Department of Oriental Literature. Diakonoff, I. M., 1989. General Outline of the First Period of the History of the Ancient World and the Problem of the Ways of Development. In, Early Antiquity. I. M. Diakonoff and Philip L. Kohl eds, pp. 27–66. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The above two sources provide a good, accessible introduction to Diakonoff’s work. Reviewing other articles in these collections will give you a general sense of how Soviet scholars interpreted developments in ancient southern Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia, Interpretivist Approaches Bahrani, Z., 2003. The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bahrani, Z., 2006. Race and Ethnicity in Mesopotamian Antiquity. World Archaeology V 38(1): 48–59. Bahrani, Z., 2008. Rituals of War. New York: Zone Books.

340  Suggested Readings Although most of these examples and discussions relate to times after the early state, the above works are stellar examples of how interpretivist approaches can be used to understand aspects of ancient states and empires. The author focuses on war and the rituals, ideology, iconography, the supernatural, and general representations associated with, for example, warfare, which is regarded as an art of civilization in Mesopotamia. Her studies rely on aspects of phenomenology and semiotics to shed light on issues such as how the body is a semiotic construction, with the ultimate goal of elucidating a uniquely Mesopotamian ontology. Pollock, S., 1999. Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that Never Was. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This is a clear and concise synthesis of southern Mesopotamian prehistory from a moderate Interpretivist stance. Pollock, S. and R. Bernbeck, 2000. And They Said, Let us Make Gods in Our Image: Gendered Ideologies in Ancient Mesopotamia. In, Reading the Body: Representations and Remains in the Archaeological Record. Alison E. Rautman ed., pp. 150–164. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. This is the source for the example of gender hierarchies discussed in this chapter. Pollock, S. and R. Bernbeck, eds, 2005. Archaeologies of the Middle East: Critical Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell. This volume provides a selection of different perspectives on southern Mesopotamia’s past, weighted towards Interpretivist accounts. 13 Multiple Views of Stonehenge Stonehenge, General Discussions and Culture History Burl, A., 2007. Stonehenge: A Complete History and Archaeology of the World’s Most Enigmatic Stone Circle. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers. Provides a good summary of early research at Stonehenge followed by a detailed account of the history of the site and its setting in Salisbury Plain. Chippindale, C., 2004. Stonehenge Complete. 3rd ed. New York: Thames and Hudson. As the name implies, a comprehensive account of research at Stonehenge through the early 2000s. It is particularly strong on early studies of the site through the mid-twentieth century. Cleal, R., K. Walker, and R. Montague, 1995. Stonehenge in its Landscape: Twentieth Century Excavations London: English Heritage. This tome provides a detailed summary of research conducted at Stonehenge up through the late twentieth century. Here you will find perhaps the most carefully constructed and thoroughly documented arguments for the sequence of changes that shaped this monument. Hawkins, G., 1963. Stonehenge Decoded. Nature 200: 306–308. Hawkins, G., 1965. Stonehenge: A Neolithic Computer. Nature 202: 1258–1261. These two articles summarize Hawkins’ influential, if much criticized, interpretations of Stonehenge as a center for the observation of celestial events. Lovata, T., 2007. Inauthentic Archaeologies: Public Uses and Abuses of the Past. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. This volume insightfully reviews the ways in which people use reconstructions of archaeological sites to establish meaningful relations with the past. The interview Lovata conducted with Adam Horowitz, Fridgehenge’s creator, is especially relevant to the material covered in this chapter. Thomas, J., 2014. The Birth of Neolithic Britain: An Interpretive Account. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Basing his discussion in interpretivist approaches, the author surveys the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition, plants, animals, portable artifacts, and monumental constructions.

Suggested Readings  341 Theory, Processual Renfrew, C., 1974. Beyond a Subsistence Economy: The Evolution of Social Organization in Prehistoric Europe. In, Reconstructing Complex Societies: An Archaeological Colloquium. C. Moore ed., Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 20, pp. 69–95. In this article the author lays out the processualist explanation for Europe’s Neolithic stone monuments from which the account outlined in this chapter is drawn. Theory, Interpretivist Aronson, M., 2010. If Stones Could Speak: Unlocking the Secrets of Stonehenge. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic. Contributions to this volume by Michael Parker Pearson provide information on the results of the Riverside Project that is exploring Stonehenge and its landscape. See also, http://www.shef.ac.uk/archaeology/ research/stonehenge for recent findings from these investigations. Bradley, R., 1998. The Significance of Monuments: On the Shaping of Human Experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. New York: Routledge. Bradley offers an interpretivist approach to understanding the significance of ancient European monuments to those who made and used them. Though not focused on Stonehenge, his remarks are certainly applicable to that site. Brück, J., 2001. Monuments, Power, and Personhood in the British Neolithic. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 7: 649–667. According to the author, the importation of modern Western ideas of personhood and power relations have led to interpretations of the Neolithic that are static. She suggests looking at relational approaches to personhood will not only improve our understanding of ancient individuals, but will also make accounts of Neolithic monuments and their meanings less Western and more in accordance with ancient views. Cusack, C., 2012. Charmed Circle: Stonehenge, Contemporary Paganism, and Alternative Archaeology. Numen 59(2–3): 138–155. Stonehenge is an iconic image and the focus of much interest by non-archaeologists. In particular, Neo-Druids—a recognized religion in the United Kingdom—see the monument as central to their practice; they have received permission to carry out rituals in the circle itself (an area not open to tourists) at certain stations of the sun. Cusack looks at this activity from the point of view of postmodernist archaeology, pointing out that the perspective has much in common with “folk” archaeological ideas. Pollard, J., 2009. The Materialization of Religious Structures in the Time of Stonehenge. Material Religion 5(3): 322–345. Religion and ritual, Pollard says, share a common ontology. With Stonehenge as the areal focus, the author addresses this proposition by considering architecture, depositional practices, and ceremonies. The aim is a history of religious practices between 3000–2300 BC/CE. Thomas, J., 1999. Understanding the Neolithic. New York: Routledge. Thomas discusses Stonehenge within the context of his overarching view of the active roles played by material culture in shaping peoples’ beliefs and actions. The example of an interpretivist approach to Stonehenge summarized in this chapter is drawn from Thomas’ book. See also the works by Christopher Tilley in the Suggested Readings for Chapter 10.

342  Suggested Readings Recent Research Allen, M., B. Chan, R. Cleal, C. French, P. March, J. Pollard, R. Pullen, C. ­R ichards, C. Ruggles, D. Robinson, J. Rylath, J. Thomas, K. Welham, and M. Parker ­Pearson, 2006. Stonehenge’s Avenue and “Bluestonehenge.” Antiquity 90: 991–1008. The bluestones now found at Stonehenge appear to have been set earlier in a henge in the Durrington Walls area by the River Avon. The construction called the Avenue links the deconstructed henge and the newer one. The Avenue, which is oriented on Stonehenge’s solstice axis, is over deep natural fissures. This provokes questions about the origin of the monumental complex. Craig, O., L-M. Shillito, U. Albarella, S. Viner-Douglas, B. Chan, R. Cleal, R. Ixer, M. Jay, P. Marshall, E. Simmons, E. Wright, M. Parker Pearson, 2015. Feeding Stonehenge: Cuisine and Consumption at the Late Neolithic Site of Durrington Walls. Antiquity 89: 1096–1109. When residences contemporary with Stonehenge were found at the site of Durrington Walls, questions about the relationships between the people there and those who might have built Stonehenge arose. Using lipid analysis (the study of residual fats in pottery), the authors have demonstrated that specific pottery types were used for particular foods, and that there was differential use of meat and dairy products between Stonehenge and the Durrington residential complex. The conclusion is that feasting united a diverse population in activities in the greater Durrington Walls-Stonehenge landscape. Parker Pearson, M., R. Bevins, R. Ixer, J. Pollard, C. Richards, K. Welham, R. Chan, K. Edinborough, D. Hamilton, R. Mcphail, D. Schlee, J-L.  ­Schwenninger, E. Simmons, and M. Smith, 2015. Craig Rhos-y-Felin: A Welsh Bluestone Megalith Quarry for Stonehenge. Antiquity 89: 1331–1352. Investigations at this site have produced evidence of how the bluestones were quarried as well as clear, direct dating of when the quarry was used. Parker Pearson, M., A. Chamberlin, M. Jay, M. Richards, A. Sheridan, N. Curtis, J. Evans, A. Gibson, M. Hutchinson, P Mahoney, P. Marshall, J. Montgomery, S. Needham, J. O’Mahoney, M. Pellegrini, and N. Wilken, 2016. Beaker People in Britain: Migration, Mobility, and Diet. Antiquity 90: 620–637. The appearance of Beaker pottery in Britain is seen as a major temporal marker. This paper discusses results from the study of 264 individuals, using isotope analysis, dental wear, and osteology combined with carbon dating. The data suggest that the Beaker complex was spread in Britain by population movement from the island, with a small amount of immigration from the continent. Parker Pearson, M., J. Pollard, C. Richards, J. Thomas, C. Tilley, K. Welham, and U. Albarella, 2006. Materializing Stonehenge: The Stonehenge Riverside Project and New Discoveries. Journal of Material Culture 11(1–2): 227–261. The authors cover recent work at the site of Durrington Walls and the area between it and Stonehenge. They focus on the materials known to have been used in these areas: stone and wood. In addition, they consider other materials which may have been significant such as turf and chalk. They relate these new discoveries and the materials found to ideas about ancestors and the dead. Willis, C., P. Marshall, J. McKinley, M. Pitts, J. Pollard, T. Waldron, K. Welham, C. Richards, J. Richards, J. Thomas, and M. Parker Pearson, 2016. The Dead of Stonehenge. Antiquity 90: 337–356. According to the most recent dating, cremated remains were interred at Stonehenge between ca. 3000–2500 BC/CE. They were first placed with small stones set into the Aubrey Holes, and later into the peripheral

Suggested Readings  343 ditch. The authors link this to a possible change from interring specific individuals with particular stones to a more general approach to the dead. Considerations of Other Monumental Neolithic Sites Cambridge Archaeological Journal 17(S1), 2007. The papers in this special edition focus on long barrows across the British Isles. Issues of chronology are paramount, with the aim of determining how long barrows were used given the short lifespans of Neolithic people, whether or not barrows might reference ancestors, and aspects of construction. Relational interpretations are significant. Cummings, V., 2011. What Lies Beneath: Thinking About the Qualities and Essences of Stone and Wood in the Chambered Tomb Architecture of Britain and Ireland. Journal of Social Archaeology 12(1): 29–50. Taking issue with the often-cited dichotomy between stone and wood in interpretations of Neolithic monuments, the author states that this is a false duality. She discusses how standard methods, such as sourcing and energetics, can provide data for understanding Neolithic concepts of stone and its uses. Her case study is Blasthill, Kintyre. Edmonds, M., and B. Bender, 1999. Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic. London: Routledge. The authors are concerned with the question of how archaeologists interpret sites given their own subjectivities and the plethora of ideas about any given site. This work does not comprehensively cover Neolithic sites, rather focusing on a selection with the intention of showing how archaeological interpretation has developed though time. Gillings, M., 2015. Betylmania?—Small Standing Stones and the Megaliths of SouthWest Britain. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 34(3): 207–233. The typical focus on large monuments has obscured the importance of Neolithic small standing stones, aka miniliths. They have construction sequences as complex as megalithic monuments, and offer unique insights into beliefs and ideas widely shared across the island. Sims, L., 2009. Entering, and Returning from the Underworld: Reconstituting Silbury Hill by Combining a Quantified Landscape Archaeology with Archaeoastronomy. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(2): 386–408. The author contrasts phenomenological approaches to landscape, which he regards as non-­reproducible interpretations, with the “harder” considerations of archaeoastronomy. The latter can provide detailed quantified information about celestial alignments, but is unable to provide meanings for those alignments. He advocates using landscape phenomenology together with archaeoastronomy in order to join hard data and interpretations of bodily experience. Tilley, C., 1996. The Power of Rocks: Topography and Monument Construction at Bodmin Moor. World Archaeology 28(2): 161–176. Tilley argues that local topography is important not just for the placement of monuments, but also forms a body of symbols that can be used to create personhood and structures of power. Also see other works by Tilley listed above in Chapter 10. 14 Conclusions Engaged Archaeology Gonzalez, S., 2016. Indigenous Values and Methods in Archaeological Practice: Low-impact Archaeology through the Kashaya Pomo Interpretive Trail Project. American Antiquity 81: 533–549.

344  Suggested Readings Okamura. K. and A. Matsuda, eds, 2011. New Perspectives in Global Public Archaeology. New York: Springer-Verlag. Pyburn, A., 2009. Practicing Archaeology—As if it Really Matters. Public Archaeology 8: 161–175. These sources will give you a good start in investigating different perspectives on engaged archaeology. You might also look at the Project Inherit website (https:// inheritp2p.wordpress.com/). Participants in Inherit are involved in putting the principles of an engaged archaeology into action by incorporating members of Maya communities in research into the prehistory and history of their ancestral populations in Yucatan and Belize. Doing Science Jahren, H., 2015. Lab Girl. New York: Vintage. Even though the author is not an archaeologist, but rather a paleoecologist, much of her work is useful to our field. That isn’t why we suggest her book—we recommend it because it is one of the most engaging accounts of actually being a scientist that we’ve ever encountered. The author has humor and is frank about both her faults and accomplishments. Since she works in a natural science at major research universities, her account of lab structures and funding problems isn’t typical for a lot of us scientists. What she does convey about field science is priceless. Read this and enjoy, and appreciate what it can take to do research.

Glossary

Acropolis:  As the term is used in Mesoamerica, it refers to a massive, ­artificial platform that supports at least one other building. Acropolises usually reached their final forms through many stages of sequent construction. In the course of this build-up, earlier edifices were covered by their successors, ultimately resulting in huge constructions. Adze:  In this case, a finely polished stone blade that was probably hafted at an acute angle to a wooden handle. Adzes were most likely woodworking implements. Also called hachas in the text. Agency:  The potential people have to make and act on choices. Analogy:  A comparison between two entities that highlights certain features that the two things share. These comparisons are designed to clarify or explain an aspect of one or both members of the pair. In particular, analogy often involves conveying meaning from one entity, the analog, to the other. Anthropocentrism:  The process of placing humans at the center of analyses, privileging their positions and dispositions above the qualities and processes pertaining to other entities, animate and inanimate, within those networks. Antihumanism:  Questions traditional definitions of human nature and seeks to move away from the idea of people as autonomous actors exercising agency in their interactions with others, human and nonhuman alike. An attempt to develop means for analyzing the world that do not place humans at the center of such studies. Antiquary:  Individuals, generally Europeans, living during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, who relied, in part, on the study of ancient objects to answer questions about the past. Unlike archaeologists, antiquaries usually focused on the presumed significance of objects treated in isolation and less on their contexts of recovery. Archaeoastronomer:  A student of the past who is primarily interested in ancient understandings of celestial phenomena, such as the movement of stars and planets, and the relation of those conceptions to the organization of material remains, such as the arrangement of buildings at sites. Archaeological culture:  Distinctive material patterns that characterize a group of sites located within a spatially delimited area. These recurring

346  Glossary

associations are thought to materialize the distinctive shared beliefs and practices of the culture in which residents of the sites in question participated. Artifact:  A portable object that was made or used by people. Artifact blank:  An unfinished object that is roughly shaped to approximate an artifact’s final form. Assemblage:  In the most general sense, an assemblage is a collection of artifacts recovered from a particular component. It also refers to a form of theory generally classed within new materialism. In this sense, assemblage refers to the relations among things and people that together constitute the lifeworld of a group of people at any one time in their history. Attribute:  Any identifiable feature of an artifact. A stylistic attribute of a pottery vessel might be the color of the paint used in its decoration. A container’s shape might be an attribute related to its function. Ballcourt:  In Mesoamerica, a venue, usually delimited by two parallel platforms, in which two individuals or teams attempted to score points by knocking a hard rubber ball into the opponent’s end of the alley and/ or through rings mounted on the court’s flanking walls. The use of the hands was generally prohibited. Though these games could sometimes be held for entertainment, they were often important parts of rituals engaged in by elites. Bajareque:  In Mesoamerican archaeology, bajareque is preserved ­fragments of the clay that originally covered the wooden framework comprising a building’s walls. Barrow:  A barrow is a construction of earth and stone that covers a tomb in which one or more burials are placed. Carbon14 dating:  A radiometric dating procedure based on the regular decay, in organic materials, of naturally occurring, unstable, radioactive Carbon14 to its stable state. Chiefdom:  A form of political organization composed of two ranked status groups. In a chiefdom, a small cadre of leaders rules a larger number of followers. The former are supported through tribute payments of food and labor provided by the latter. Component:  All deposits identified at an archaeological site that date to roughly the same time period. Common sense:  Reasoning by reference to widely shared, often implicit, premises. These principles frequently constitute parts of a worldview. Community:  People who live in physical proximity and who develop, as one of their social identities, a sense of belonging to that co-resident group. Communities can exist at various spatial and temporal scales. There is a move, especially among social scientists who study transnational interactions within globalizing contexts, to redefine communities as spatially dispersed entities whose affiliations are rooted less in a specific place than in a more diffuse sense of belonging to a spatially extensive network of people who see themselves as participants in the same culture.

Glossary  347

This view of community begins to approach the definition of an ethnic group (see ethnicity). Concept:  Refers to an idea or principle embedded within a theory. Concepts are often named variables thought to be significant in describing and explaining a particular phenomenon or process. Context:  Context has been interpreted in many ways. As the term is applied in archaeological fieldwork, context specifies vertical and horizontal relations among artifacts, features, and the soils in which they are embedded. It is information on these relations that converts isolated items into patterns that provide the basis for inferring the ancient behaviors that produced those patterns. Craft manufacturing:  Production engaged in by a segment of an entire population that generates surpluses for exchange. Also called craft specialization and craft production. Cultural evolutionist:  As used in this text, “evolutionist” refers to a loosely connected group of social thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and the U.S. They proposed that all human behavior could be explained by ascertaining where within their universal, unilineal, and so-called progressive schemes of culture change those actions fell. Taking modern Europe and the U.S. as the current endpoints of this evolutionary sequence, evolutionists arranged all known human societies within stages of increasing complexity that supposedly recapitulated the course of human history. Culture:  A set of beliefs, values, and assumptions learned within and shared by a group of people that gives rise to a coherent and predictable body of behavior. Culture area:  A more-or-less environmentally homogenous area that is or was home to a group of distinct cultures that share a significant proportion of their diagnostic traits. Culture areas are thought, within Boasian anthropology, to have arisen through the process of trait diffusion from an innovating center within that region. Dasein:  The quality, in Heidegger’s view of phenomenology, of being in and engaged with the world. Being a person does not involve a strict division between the thinking individual and the world they seek to analyze. Rather, the essence of a person is to be fully engaged through all their senses with a world of people and things who are themselves fully defined by their experiences with that world. Daub:  Clay that was originally used to make the walls of buildings. The clay was applied over a woven stick framework; impressions of this structure sometimes were preserved in burnt fragments of daub, also called bajareque. Deconstruction:  A process by which the basic, often unconscious, assumptions and values underlying any act (including the writing of texts) are exposed and their essential contradictions highlighted.

348  Glossary

Deduction:  A form of reasoning in which truth claims about the world are logically entailed, or follow inevitably from, a set of guiding premises. If the premise is true and the rules of logic are followed in deducing a conclusion from it, then that conclusion in certainly true. The ­hypothetic-deductive method described in Chapter 4 is a form of deductive reasoning. See also positivism. Deductive reasoning is often contrasted with inductive reasoning. Dependent variable:  A factor the form or nature of which is specified within a theory as being determined by the operation of another process or factor (the latter being the independent variable). Description:  A statement that specifies the nature, form, and/or quality of something. Development of underdevelopment:  Originally articulated by development theorists, this concept was later used by proponents of world systems theory to express the process by which societies in peripheries are systematically impoverished due to unrelenting exploitation by cores. Diffusion:  The spread of ideas or goods without the permanent or longterm migration of people. Elite:  Those members of a society who enjoy privileged access to resources, including the power to direct the actions of others. Also called leaders, magnates, monarchs, nobility, paramount lords, potentates, and rulers in this text. Embodiment:  Derived from phenomenology, embodiment theory proposes that: we understand the world from the perspective of our physical being (a body in space); that physical being is largely a cultural product; hence, our understanding of the world is formed by the ways in which what we learn as cultural beings shapes how we apprehend reality through our physical senses; human actions follow from those culturally constructed perceptions. Analyzing how body, perception, and culture are inextricably bound together in any social group is, therefore, a fruitful avenue for describing and understanding human behavior. Emic:  A study which seeks to understand patterned human behavior from the perspective of the people who engage in those actions. Generally associated with inferring the meanings actors attribute to their actions. Empiricism:  The position that knowledge is derived from our sensory experience of the world. By extension, in the natural sciences, empiricism refers to the way of knowing the world by subjecting hypotheses about it to rigorous testing. Enchantment:  See entanglement. Entailment:  See entanglement. Entanglement:  Sometimes call “entrapment,” “entailment,” or “enchantment,” this view holds that humans are enmeshed in networks composed of complex interactions among diverse people and things. This entwining comprises the structure which constrains and enables the decisions we make and the actions we take based on those choices. Each element

Glossary  349

in these networks has its own distinct characteristics and rates of change, but their significance depends more on how they are related to each other and less on their unique features. Describing and explaining behavior, therefore, depends on describing these complex interrelations. Entrapment:  See entanglement. Epistemology:  The study of knowledge, specifically how we know what we claim to know. Epistemological analyses may also examine the relation between truth and knowledge. Ethnicity:  A form of group identity based on the notion of a shared essence among members that arises from a common history. This affiliation is manifest in performances, such as those relating to dress, food preparation and consumption, and so forth, that are seen by members to be distinctive of their group. Ethnoarchaeology:  Conduct of research in the present for the insights it can provide into ancient behaviors. Considerable attention in these investigations is devoted to chronicling the material signatures of specific behaviors in which living people engage. Those correlations are used to infer the actions that produced patterning among archaeologically recovered items. This is a form of analogic reasoning within middle range theory. Ethnogenesis:  The process by which ethnic groups come into being. Etic:  A study that seeks to determine the significance of patterned human behavior by reference to concepts and theories judged relevant by outside observers. These terms and processes may well not be recognized or understood by the people being studied. Explanation:  Statements that specify a causal relationship(s) among a set of variables operating under a specific set of conditions. Facing:  See platform facing. Feature:  An artifact that is too large to move or whose removal from the ground would destroy its integrity. Gender:  Culturally defined expectations of behaviors and dispositions ­appropriate to people with certain sexual characteristics. Gender refers to the cultural construction of biological sex. Gestalt:  As used in phenomenology, gestalt refers to a way of being, and approaching the world. Good sense:  Reasoning by reference to explicitly considered premises that are open to evaluation and refutation based on new observations. Habitus:  A set of largely unconscious ways of thinking and acting that tend to be shared by people occupying a specific structural position (defined by such features as socioeconomic class, gender, age, and so forth) within a society. Habitus come to shape a person’s notion of who they are and what they might accomplish in life. Hacha:  See adze. Heterarchy:  A situation in which people and groups are not organized within a single political hierarchy but can be ranked in various

350  Glossary

hierarchies according to different principles or criteria. A measure of complexity that is not equated with hierarchical political and economic structures. Hierarchy:  A situation in which people and groups within a culture can be arranged within a single, overarching system of inequality based on differential access to essential political, social, ideological, and/or economic resources. Historically contingent:  To say that a behavior is “historically contingent” is to claim that it is the result of interactions among variables, the natures of, and relations among which, are products of conditions that pertain at a specific moment in time. This phrase and the ideas it conveys are central to culture historical and interpretivist arguments that cultural developments are largely the unpredictable outcomes of events that are not subject to general laws but are the consequences of unique historical circumstances. Household:  A group of people linked by enduring social ties who reside together and cooperate in those tasks crucial to meeting their members’ needs of physical and social reproduction. Household members may or may not acknowledge kinship connections with each other. Humanism:  A view which privileges the agency and aims of human beings in understanding the world. Humanism, at least as it is understood now, stresses the importance of rationalism and empiricism, as opposed to relying on common sense or supernatural revelation, in learning about the world. Hypothesis:  A set of propositions about the causal relations among a collection of variables that apply directly to a particular set of spatially and temporally delimited circumstances. Hypotheses transform the abstract propositions of a theory into terms specific to a particular context. This grounding of the abstract in the prosaic facilitates evaluating a theory’s utility in accounting for a given set of observations. See also, theory, middle-level. Hypothetico-deductive method:  A form of explanation that accounts for specific events by subsuming them under general laws. Ideology:  As used here, a body of beliefs, values, and assumptions that rationalizes, naturalizes, and/or legitimizes existing social and political relations. Identity:  See social identity. Independent invention:  The creation of a novel set of cultural behaviors or materials through the creative exercise of imagination without significant stimuli originating from outside a culture. Independent variable:  A factor that, according to the principles of a specific theory, causes the form and nature of other factors (called the dependent variables). Induction:  A form of reasoning that accounts for a set of observations by reference to principles which may be true, but whose truth is always open to

Glossary  351

question and refutation. The resulting explanation is, therefore, open-ended. Inference to the best explanation is a form of inductive reasoning. Inference to the best explanation:  This phrase refers to a mode of inductive reasoning that draws refutable interpretations from an analysis of a body of observations in terms of a set of concepts drawn from a theory or worldview. These explanations are always subject to change as new data come to light. Instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA):  A method for describing the chemical and mineral composition of materials based on examining the reactions of the atoms comprising these items to bombardment with neutrons. Intensity of production:  In reference to craft manufacture, production intensity refers to the proportion of a person’s economic activities that are devoted to engaging in the task of making something. Usually measures of production intensity are arrayed along a continuum from full-time (all or most of a person’s time is devoted to craft manufacture) to part-time specialization (fashioning craft goods is an activity ancillary to other productive pursuits, such as farming). Intersectionality:  The notion that a person’s social identity is defined by the convergence of a variety of factors, such as age, gender, socioeconomic class, and so forth, not just one of them. Intersubjectivity:  The notion derived from phenomenology and linguistics that: all individuals apprehend the world from their unique perspectives (their own subjectivities); in order to live in societies we must understand, and so predict the actions of, each other; these shared understandings constitute widely, if not universally, shared values within a group that allow us to make different individual perspectives mutually intelligible. Intersubjectivity stresses that knowledge of another culture, past or present, is achieved when the investigator grasps the system of meanings by which multiple subjectivities are or were translated into mutually understandable terms by members of that group. Intertextuality:  The notion that any event is so thoroughly conditioned by a wide range of events and processes which precede and are contemporary with it that it cannot be: 1. understood in isolation from this rich context; 2. predicted or explained by reference to general laws as these broad prescriptions strip the event of its dense network of historically contingent, causally significant interconnections. Kiln:  An enclosed structure designed for firing pottery at controlled temperatures. Kilns are usually associated with the high-volume manufacture of ceramics. Lifeworld:  From phenomenology, the universe composed of those aspects of reality that we taken for granted and understandings of which are to some extent shared by members of a group. This term can also refer to all the aspects and relations that constitute an individual’s experiences of reality, including their places in that reality.

352  Glossary

Logical positivism:  See positivism. Materialism:  A general term for theories that privilege peoples’ interactions with the physical conditions of their existence in explaining ­human behavior. In this view, ideas are secondary to, and determined by, interactions between people and tangible features of their physical environments. Processualism and most forms of Marxism are materialist perspectives. Maya lowlands:  The adjoining portions of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras that are of moderate elevation and witnessed the flowering of Maya civilization from at least the fourth century BC through the tenth century AD. Mesoamerica:  A culture area stretching from central Mexico through Guatemala, western Honduras, Belize, and western El Salvador. The zone is distinguished culturally by shared general features of prehistoric beliefs and practices as well as by relatively intense interactions among members of its component societies. Migration:  The resettlement of sizable numbers of people in a locale at some distance from their original home. This process often involves the transfer of cultural information. Model:  A schematic, simplified representation of the phenomenon under study that includes only those variables thought to be important in understanding that phenomenon. There are fine distinctions among model, hypothesis, and theory and definitions of each differ somewhat among sources. In this book we have focused on theory and hypothesis, largely treating models as equivalent to theories. Modernism:  The general intellectual movement, derived from the Enlightenment, whose members espoused the notion that all aspects of human behavior are best understood by employing scientific procedures based on models developed in the natural sciences. Human action is, therefore, knowable and can be explained using universally applicable general laws. Ultimately, many modernists believed that these investigations would form the basis for reorganizing society along supposed rational lines in accord with clear scientific principles. Norm:  Refers to a rule of behavior. Normative views of society posit that all members of the group share much the same views of the world and conform to the same rules. Objectivism:  The philosophy that reality, and truths about reality, exist outside the human mind and can be discovered through systematic study. Observation:  The selective registering, and organization into a coherent structure, of data obtained through various senses. Obsidian:  Volcanic ejecta that has rapidly cooled after exposure to the air. This stone is so fine-grained that it is often referred to as “volcanic glass.” It was used throughout Prehispanic Mesoamerica for making tools. Obsidian flows are highly localized in Mesoamerica, each source having a distinct mineral-chemical signature by which its products can be traced.

Glossary  353

Ontology:  Refers to the study of the essential nature of being, categories of being, and the relations among beings that constitute reality. Operationalize:  The process of transforming the variables specified in a hypothesis into factors that can be measured, or at least observed, in a field setting. Opportunistic sampling:  A strategy for choosing where and what to investigate from a large population of possible observations based on criteria, the relevance of which to understanding that population is unclear. Often the selection process is conditioned by factors of greater pertinence to the investigator than they were to the people being studied. Opportunistic sampling does not provide a strong basis for making reliable statements about the larger whole from which the sample was drawn. Paradigm:  A body of concepts, assumptions, associated methods, and criteria for evaluating research shared by members of a scientific discipline. Paradigms guide and inform the investigations of that discipline’s members. Particularism:  A view in anthropology that each culture is a unique configuration of beliefs and behaviors that are the product of its distinct history. Explanations that seek to account for those histories and their results must be specific to each culture. Paste:  In relation to pottery, paste refers to the composition of the clay, and the purposeful inclusions it contains, from which a vessel was made. Perspectivism:  Knowledge about a subject is limited and skewed according to the viewpoint (the perspective) of the observer. Phase:  Refers to all components at sites within a region that date to the same period and pertain to the same archaeological culture. Phenomenology:  As applied in archaeology, phenomenology generally focuses on how human subjectivity is constituted through our interactions with the material world; meaning derives from human dealings with materials. Platform facing:  The stone retaining walls that bound a platform’s ­perimeter and contain the fill which comprises the building’s core. Political centralization:  The process by which power is concentrated into ever fewer hands. Political economy:  A flexible concept that for our purposes is understood as the manner in which processes of production, consumption, and distribution are harnessed by factions seeking power in all its forms. Polychrome pottery:  Ceramic vessels decorated with designs painted in three or more colors. Polysemous:  The notion that the same symbol may have multiple meanings at one time, within one social group. Positivism:  Describes an approach to explanation based on a hierarchy of laws, hypotheses, and operating conditions. Specific events are explained as manifestations of general principles, expressed as laws, thought

354  Glossary

to operate universally under specifiable circumstances. Observations are therefore explained when they are subsumed under established laws; if the law is true then so is the explanation deduced from it. Posthumanism:  A very general position that seeks to shift the focus away from human beings when trying to understand the world. Also questions traditional views of what it means to be human. Postmodernism:  A broad intellectual movement that developed in opposition to modernism. This perspective encompasses a wide array of different viewpoints generally united by their: 1. Distrust of broad theory that purports to account for phenomena by the operation of universal principles; 2. Contention that, as far as human behavior is concerned, action is historically contingent and culturally constructed (i.e., it derives from a context shaped by the convergence of unique cultural and historical forces); and, 3. A commitment to highlighting the diverse ways in which people understand their world and negotiate their places within it. Power:  The ability to direct the actions of others or to resist those incursions. Power need not be associated with physical coercion nor must it be invested in formal political offices. Rather, power is an attribute of all social relations, permeating most interactions in which we engage. Power is also expressed at many levels from individual actions to the economic, political, and ideological structures in which those initiatives are taken. In general, social scientists are primarily interested in how these structural variables condition the choices made by individuals. Recent trends in theory question this emphasis and, instead, consider the recursive relation between individual actions and the structures in which those behaviors occur. Pragmatics:  The study of meaning as conveyed in language during daily interactions, attending to the importance of physical, cultural, and social contexts in clarifying those meanings. This is less a study of formal language rules (which would fall under semantics) and more an analysis of how we understand each other by decoding the literal (dictionary) and implied meanings of statements. Production scale:  The volume at which goods within a particular craft are produced over a certain period of time in a society or by groups in that society. Rectified mapping:  Recording the forms and arrangements of buildings at a site based on standardized conventions that depict platforms as squares or rectangles unless there is strong evidence to the contrary. Also known as Mahlerization, after the archaeologist Eduard Mahler who was one of the first to use this form of mapping. Recursive:  A relationship among two or more variables in which the form of one is strongly affected by the form of the other(s). Reductionist:  As used here, reductionism is a mode of explanation in which a phenomenon is accounted for by reference to factors and relations thought to operate on a more basic level than the phenomenon

Glossary  355

in question. Accounting for cultural features by the operation of such non-cultural forces as adaptation to the physical environment is a form of reductionist explanation in this sense. Relative/relativism:  The view that a set of human behaviors can only be understood within the context of the culture in which they are performed. Taken to its extreme, relativism can also mean that all truth claims are only supportable within the conceptual system that inspires them. Truth, in this view, is relative to the perspective of the observer, specifically to the conceptual framework that they hold. Representative sample:  A set of observations that captures the full range of variation within the total universe of possible observations from which it is drawn. Romanticism:  An intellectual tradition opposed to analytical and generalizing approaches to knowledge. Instead, its adherents stress understanding phenomena within the unique cultural and historical conditions in which they arose and operate. Sample:  Selecting a set of observations from the total universe of potential observations within a specific domain. The sample is the basis for statements made about features of the domain from which it was drawn. Scale of production:  See Production scale. School of thought:  A very general, abstract body of principles and concepts employed in explaining a set of processes, such as human behavior, out of which specific high-level theories are created. The precepts and principles of a school of thought are less clearly articulated, and are less widely shared within an academic discipline, than are those of a paradigm. Semiotics:  The study of signs and their interpretation. More broadly, ­semiotics is a study of how humans make meaning in all that we do. Seriation:  Arranging deposits within a chronological sequence based on variations in the presence or proportions of artifacts characterized by particular styles found within these units. Settlement pattern:  The distribution of sites located during a survey across a region. Site:  Any spatially discrete evidence of human activity. Sites where people lived and carried on a wide array of tasks are also referred to here as settlements. Site hierarchy:  An arrangement of settlements into categories based on factors, such as their sizes and/or the monumentality of their standing architecture, that are thought to reflect the relative power of their resident elites. Social fact:  A recurring pattern of behavior that is guided by a shared body of underlying assumptions and values. Social facts are not the result solely or primarily of an individual’s wishes or inclinations. Rather, those desires and dispositions are shaped by the cultural principles pertaining in a particular place at a specific moment in time. It is these patterned actions and their underlying premises that comprise the basic subject matter of the social sciences.

356  Glossary

Social identity:  A sense of self established in the course of one’s regular and recurring interactions with others. Each individual has multiple social identities to draw on depending, in part, on who they are interacting with, in which contexts, and with what goals in mind. Social identities are often distinguished by certain behaviors and material markers. Persona is used as a synonym for social identity here. Social valuables:  Items that play important roles in producing and reproducing important interpersonal relationships through their exchange and use. Southeast Mesoamerica:  The adjacent portions of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala; sometimes called the Southeast Maya Periphery. Space-time systematics:  Shorthand for defining the basic units of material variation by means of which archaeological cultures and their histories are described. In addition to archaeological cultures, these units include components and phases. Spindle whorls:  These are weights attached to a spindle (usually a wooden rod). Together, the spindle and whorl enable the production of thread for weaving. Loose, unspun material, such as wool or cotton, is attached to the spindle rod. When the rod is dropped and spun, the spindle draws out the raw material. This, in turn, is twisted into thread by the spinning. The spindle and whorl can also be turned in a container. State:  A form of political organization characterized by: 1. Significant power concentrated in the hands of an elite faction; 2. That power is backed up by a monopoly of coercive force vested in the hands of the rulers; 3. Sociopolitical hierarchies composed of three or more tiers; 4. Marked social differentiation within a society constituted by such factors as distinctions in ethnicity, occupation, religion, and social class. Stratigraphy:  The principle that, in cases where earth levels are relatively undisturbed, materials found deeper down are older than those found higher up in the sequence. It is through the study of temporal changes in material styles, as revealed in stratigraphic sequences, that we can reconstruct the phases through which cultures in a region have passed. Structure:  That concatenation of resources and the rules by which they are acquired and put to use that together constrain and enable peoples’ actions. Style:  Attributes of a behavior or object that are the results of choices made by the individual who performed that action or fashioned that object. Subjectivism:  The philosophy that truth is relative to the experience of the person perceiving reality and defining truths about what they perceive. Personal experience is the only reliable measure of reality. Sui generis:  As used here, this is an approach to the study of human ­behavior in which explanations are phrased in purely cultural terms.

Glossary  357

Survey:  Systematic search of the ground surface in an effort to locate, ­record, and describe archaeological sites. Systems theory:  A perspective, often linked to processualism, that at its most general posits such close interrelations among behaviors within a culture, that no action can be fully understood without specifying its connection to other behaviors enacted within that culture. Techno-environmental determinism:  Refers to explanations that view culture as a system the overall form of which is determined by causally significant interrelations among variables of technology, demography, and those aspects of the physical environment to which a group of people is adapting. This notion is usually associated with processualism. Theory, high-level:  A body of interrelated statements that specifies concepts, and relations among those concepts, used to describe and explain some aspect of the world. Conceptual structure, conceptual framework, and conceptual scheme are used synonymously with high-level theory here. Theory, low-level:  Observed recurring patterns noted among two or more variables. Theory, middle-level:  Falsifiable propositions that explain relations among two or more variables by reference to principles derived from high-level theory. See also, Hypothesis. Theory, middle-range:  Falsifiable propositions that account for patterns noted in archaeologically uncovered material remains by reference to the behaviors that caused those patterns. Middle-range theory often draws on some form of analogy in identifying these relationships. Totalizing narrative:  This phrase is often used by postmodernists to describe accounts of human behavior based on general principles thought to apply to a wide range of societies. Trait:  Any aspect of human behavior that is thought to be isolable; the rough behavioral equivalent of a trait in archaeology is an artifact. Transhumanism:  A view of humans which allows for their enhancement through the applications of technologies which render us more, or different, than we were before the applications of those procedures. Are we still human if we have artificial knees, for example? This perspective looks to a future when the notion of a “natural” (non-technologically enhanced) human nature may be irrelevant to understanding who we are in the world. Type:  A category of artifacts that includes items defined by the regular and patterned re-occurrence of certain attributes on them. Valuables:  Refers to items held in high esteem by the people who made and/or used them. Value:  In reference to artifacts and features, value is a measure of the esteem in which something was held. Variable:  An entity that can have more than one value.

358  Glossary

Wealth:  A measure of a person’s or group’s ability to accumulate valuable items. The objects collected may be esteemed for their economic, social, political, and/or ideological significance. Worldview:  A body of concepts shared by a group of people who use those ideas to understand themselves, others, and the world around them. Unlike theories, worldviews are not subject to systematic testing. Ziggurat:  Ziggurat refers to the massive terraced platforms that were raised in southern Mesopotamia during antiquity; they often supported a temple.

Index

acropolis 67, 203–204 actor-network theory 223, 225–227 Adams, Robert McCormick 248, 252, 258, 261, 309 adaptation 74–75, 76–79, 81–84, 92, 100, 172–173, 195, 252, see also processualism adze blades 143, 149 Afro-decendientes 187 agency 162, 164, 166, 176, 259; in Marxism 103, 110, 162; secondary 223 agriculture 32, 65, 86, 99, 102, 232–233; irrigation 249; Mesopotamia 242, 249– 250, 254–255, 258, 261; Naco Valley 30–31, 90, 91–94, 96–97, 109, 113 Algaze, Guillermo 56, 253–254, 256, 257–258, 309 Altar Stone 267, 286 analogy 83; reasoning by 16–17 Ancient Monuments Act 290 Anderson, Kirk 90–93, 95, 96–97, 113 androcentric view 179–181 animism 223, 224 anthropocentrism 175, 223 antihumanism 175 antiquary 268–273, 293–294 archaeoastronomy 280 archaeological cultures 46–47, 49, 79, 186, 293 artifacts 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 58, 62, 66–69, 83, 112–113, 144–145; blanks 114, 117, 121–122; ceramic stamps 129–130, 139, 150; Marxism 104–106, see also ceramics; figurines; ocarinas; whistles Ashmore, Wendy 110 assemblages 50, 223, 227–229, 232, 236–240 Assyrians 244, 245, 246–247, 273

attributes 48, 83 Aubrey Holes 275, 280 Aubrey, John 270–271, 272 awls 237 bajareque (daub) 133, 155 ballcourts 54, 60, 67, 69, 70, 122, 139, 146, 205–208, 237–238, 298 Bally, Charles 198 barbarism 43 Barrett, J. 217, 218 barrows 268, 272, 273, 275, 282, 287 the base 103 beakers 293–294 being-in-the-world (Dasein) 213, 214, 218 binary views 183, 185, 195, 197, 214–215 Binford, Lewis 27, 73 Blackmore, C. 189–190 bluestones 267–268, 275, 277, 279, 286, 289 Boas, Franz 43, 44, 45–46, 101 Bourdieu, Pierre 160, 161, 163, 202, 215 bracketing 211, 217 Brentano, Franz 210 Brisas 39 Bronze Age 42, 119, 273, 304 bundles 223, 229–230 burials 51, 228; mounds 217–218, 287–288; Ur 246, see also Stonehenge Burl, Aubrey 287 Busacca, G. 237 Cacaulapa Valley 297 caches 55 Calakmul 34, 35, 36, 38 calendar system 55, 211 capitalism 100, 108

360 Index Carbon14 dating 14–15, 24, 92, 127, 144, 277, 278, 300 Caribbean coast 68, 129 Carter, Ben 137 Çatalhöyük 230, 232 causality/causation 76, 84, 173, 229 cave art 197 central place theory 87, 88 ceramic frequency seriation 66–67 ceramics 69–71, 298–299; beakers 293–294; figurines 129–133, 139, 142–143, 149, 152, 153, 155, 158, 169, 191, 301; INAA 136; incense burners 153, 155, 169; kilns 133–137, 139, 149, 155–156, 297, 300; large-scale manufacturing 133–137; processualism 83; sherds 58–59, 66, 68, 116–117, 121–122, 133, 157, 297; stamps 129–130, 139, 150; symbols 193–195; type–variety approach 58–59, 63–64, 66, 83–84, 106, 193–194; vessels 60 Chalcolithic (Copper) Age 119 Chamelecon Polychrome 59 Chamelecon river 29, 31, 39, 64, 70, 91–93, 219 La Champa Group 59 Chan 189–190 chert tools 114, 115, 125, 237 Chichen Itza 38, 55 chiefdoms 281–283 Childe,V. Gordon 46, 47 Christaller, Walter 88 cities 249 civilization stage 43 Clark, Graham 75 Clarke, David 73, 74 cloth: decoration 129–133, 139, 149, 150, 152; spindle whorls 130, 150 clusters 48, 87 Coe, William 239 Comayagua Valley 68 common sense 3–6, 7, 11 community 189 components 50 conch shells 1–2, 114–115, 121–122, 125–129, 149, 237–240 Conejo Bichrome 59 Conkey, Margaret 180, 181 Connell, Sam 136 consciousness 209–210, 211 constructivist view 187 context 42; Mesopotamia 244–245; semiotics 195, 199, 201

Copán 31, 35, 36, 38, 55, 59, 67–68, 69–72, 109–112, 116, 121, 139–140, 158, 194, 205–206, 237, 298 copper working 47, 297 coral 114–115, 121, 127, 129, 139, 149, 237 Cortés, Hernán 54 craft manufacturing 69, 93–95, 96–97, 102, 106, 116, 118–119, 123–140, 141–144, 148–158, 166–169, 297–299, see also ceramics Crumley, Carole 148, 149 cultural anthropology 186 cultural boundaries 46, 49, 50, 53, 56, 57, 79, 83, 187–188, 247 cultural constructions 195 cultural evolutionism 41–45 cultural relativity 174 culture 6, 17, 21, 27–28, 74–79, 81–86, 162, 172, 174–176, 188–189, 193–194, 197, 211, 214, 222, 233, 239, 259, 262, 273, 282–289; Marxism 98, 100–101, 104–106, 119, 124, 129, 224, 257; subsytems 75, 76; Western 179–180, 183, 185, 217, see also archaeological cultures; culture history; material culture culture areas 28, 49, 52–53, 124, 186, 193 culture history 40, 41–72, 73, 77, 78, 95–96, 135, 145, 162, 193, 227, 249–250, 252–253, 299–302; Stonehenge 273–275, 277–279, 293–294; Sumerians 245–247; trends 33 cuneiform 243, 244, 250, 264 cut blocks 205, 206, 207 cylinder seals 260–261 Darwin, Charles 41, 43–44 Dasein 213, 214, 218 daub (bajareque) 133, 155 deconstruction 172 Deetz, James 199 Deleuze, Gilles 234 dependency theory 108 dependent variables 12 development of underdevelopment 110 diachronic 198 Diakonoff, Igor 253, 254, 255, 257–258, 261, 309 diffusion 47, 49–50, 53, 55, 89, 246, 278–279, 300 domains 215–216

Index  361 domestication 13, 14–15, 17, 20–22, 32, 43, 50, 77–78, 173, 180, 232 Douglass, John 90, 93–95, 96–97, 158 Druids 270–273, 290–293 Durkheim, Emile 18, 19–20 Durrington Walls 287, 288–289 Early Classic 33, 34–35, 61 Early Postclassic 33, 38, 91 ecology 249, 252 effigies see figurines elites 4, 32, 35–36, 60, 62, 69, 71–72, 147–149, 151–152, 155–156, 158–159, 166–169, 250, 281–282, 298–299; assemblages 239; ballcourts 67, 206–207; Marxism 102–103, 106–107, 109, 110–114, 117–118, 120–124, 137–140; metallurgy 47; semiotics 194–195, 203–207; subordinate 89 embodiment 209, 214–215, 216–217, 220 emic perspective 45, 193, 209, 284 empiricism 174, 214–215 enchantment 223, 230–233 Enlightenment 43–44, 80 entailment 233–233 entanglement 223, 230–233 entrapment 223, 230–233 epistemology 221–222 essentialist view 186–187 ethical norms 182 ethnicity 177–178, 186–189, 191, 295 ethnoarchaeology 136, 188, 222 ethnogenesis 188 ethnographic studies 183 etic view 73–74, 193 Euphrates river 241–242, 247, 256, 269 evolution 7, 41–45, 46; processualism 78; sociopolitical 86 exchanges 120, 124, 155, 237 explanation 2–3, 8, 11, 13, 16, 18, 20–24, see also inference to the best explanation facings 35, 133, 146, 205, 206 features 48, 49, 104–105 feedback loops, negative 75–76 feminism 177–184, 185–186, 190–192, 221, 259–262 figurines 129–133, 139, 142–143, 149, 152, 153, 155, 158, 169, 191, 301 Flannery, Kent 75, 76 flat ontology 223, 224–225 flooding 90, 91–93, 97

foils 21–22 forces of production 47, 99, 102–105, 121 forensic science 14 frequency seriation 51–52, 66–67 functional hunkydoryism 100 garbagolists 222 Geertz, Clifford 95, 227 Gell, Alfred 223, 233–234 gender 177–186, 191, 195, 258–262, 301 Geoffrey of Monmouth 265 Gero, Joan 180, 181 gestalt 215, 216 Giddens, Sir Anthony 160, 161–162, 167, 199 gift-giving 120, 129 Göbekli Tepe 236, 334 good sense 3–4, 6–9, 11 Gramsci, Antonio 4 grinding stones 124, 149, 153, 155, 169, 236 group identity 178, 186–189, 294 Gualjoquito 111 Guatemala 27, 29, 54, 297; Motagua valley 28, 29, 31; obsidian 68, 129 Guattari, Felix 234 habitus 160, 163, 202, 215 hachas see adze blades Hawkins, Gerald 280–281 Heel Stone 266, 277, 280, 287 Heidegger, Martin 209, 212–214, 215, 216, 217–218 Henderson, John 28, 29, 53, 57–60, 62, 67, 111, 112, 145 henge 268, 275, 287, see also Stonehenge Hero Twins 206, 207 heterarchy 148, 149 hierarchies 27, 261; Marxism 99–100, 102, 103, 107, 109, 112, 119, 122; social valuables 119; the State 247, 252; Terminal Classic 148, see also site hierarchies hieroglyphics 55, 70 high-level theories 7, 8, 12, 13, 16–17, 18, 24 hijras 183–184 historical contingency 9 Hodder, Ian 199–200, 227, 230–233 Honduras 219, 307; decoration 194; ethnicity 187; Naco Valley 25–40; Sula Plain 133, 134, see also Naco Valley; La Sierra

362 Index households in Mesoamerica 35, 38 humanism 174–175, 223 Husserl, Edmund 209–211, 212, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218 Hutson, Scott R. 202–205 hypotheses 8–17, 22–24, 176 hypothetico-deductive method 79–80 iconicity 201, 205, 206–208 idealism 214–215 identity 171–192, 294–295; group 178, 186–189, 294; Stonehenge 292–296 ideology in Marxism 102–104, 255, 258 incense burners 153, 155, 169 independent invention 49–50 independent variables 12, 14 indexicality 201, 204, 205, 206–208 inductive reasoning 2–3 inequality 27, 108, 148, 163, 172, 253; Bourdieu 160; Marxism 100, 102–103, 104, 106; mode of production 100 inference to the best explanation 2–3, 5–7, 11, 13, 17, 21–24, 51, 70, 79–80, 90–92, 107, 110, 118, 122, 137–138, 144, 159, 167, 189, 193, 250, 292, 298–300, 306 Ingold, Tim 224, 234–236, 237–239 instrumental ethnicity 187 instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) 136 intensity of production 125–128 intentionality 211, 218 interpretant 201, 204 interpretivism 40, 193, 195, 221–222, 258–260, 262, 283–284, 287, 299, 300, 302 intersectionality 178, 185, 188 intersexuality 183–184 intersubjectivity 211, 213–214, 217 intertextuality 173 IQ tests 11–13, 20, 21, 22 Iron Age 42, 273 jade 60 Jagger, Mick 66 Jicaro Ware 59 Jones, Inigo 269–270 Joyce, Rosemary 144–145, 301 K’ak’ Tiliw’ Chan Yo’at 36 kilns 133–137, 139, 149, 155–156, 297, 300 Ko, I. 217, 218 Kuhn, Thomas 18–19, 80

Late Classic 35, 39, 59–62, 68–72, 87, 89–93, 95–97, 109, 111–118, 121–130, 135–152, 155–156, 159, 166, 168–169, 191, 205, 298, 302, 304; culture history 33; La Sierra site core 37–38; Naco Valley map 30; traits 54–55 Late Postclassic 33, 39, 53, 68–69, 70, 89, 203 Late Preclassic 32, 33, 34, 203 Latour, Bruno 223, 225–227 Leroi-Gourhan, Andre 197, 199 Levi-Strauss, Claude 197, 199 lifeworlds 211, 213, 215 linguistics 195, 197, 198 logical positivism 79–80 low-level theories 7, 8 lunar eclipses 280 Magnoni, Aline 202–205 Maler, Teobert 63 Man the Hunter model 179–180 Marx, Karl 98–99, 104 Marxian theory 40, 47, 99–107, 176, 195, 221, 223, 300, 302 Marxism 4, 60, 96, 162, 172–173; Prestige Goods Theory 119–140; state of power 253–255; trade and power 98–118 material culture 145, 188, 198–199, 222, 245, 258, 274, 283, 293–295 material flux 234–236, 237–238 material goods 96 materialism 73, 76, 99, 103, 104–105, 222–223, see also Marxism; processualism materiality 223, see also new materiality Maya culture 27, 28, 54–56, 57 means of production 99, 101–105, 121, 261 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 209, 214–217, 218 meshwork 223–224, 234–236 Mesolithic 42, 232 Mesopotamia 47, 56, 62, 63, 119, 129, 241–264, 299, 300, 301–302, 305 metal-working 47, 103, 297 Mexica (Aztecs) 39 Middle Preclassic 32, 33, 68, 203 middle-level theories 7, 8, 12, 14, 16, 123 middle-range theory 16–17, 73, 123, 124, 136 migration 50, 53, 55, 246 mind–body dualism 214–215, 216 Minoans 278

Index  363 Mintz, Sidney 101 mode of production 4, 99–104, 108–110, 121, 162, 290 models 5–6, 12, 23, 41, 67, 69–70, 72, 74, 87–88, 108, 111, 123, 150, 179, 218, 281, 302, see also worldviews modernism 80–81, 171, 173–174, 176, 221 Molière 219 Monte Alban 34, 35, 36 Morgan, Lewis Henry 42–43, 52 Motagua valley 28, 29, 31 musical instruments 129, 130–133, 138, 139, 143, 149, 169, 191, 301 Mycenaeans 278 Naco Valley 1–2, 25–40, 189, 190–192, 297, 302–304, 306, 309; assemblages 236–240; culture history 40, 53–72; phenomenology 219–220; power relations 145–159; practice theory 159, 164–170; prehistory 32–39, 159, 298– 301; Prestige Goods Theory 121–140; processualism 84–97; regional context 158–159; semiotics 205–208; setting 29–31; Site 123, Santo Domingo 32, 34; soil quality 30–31; symbols 193–194; weather 30; world systems theory 107–112, see also La Sierra Naqueños 64, 113, 140, 144, 191, 219 natural selection 7, 41 nearest neighbor analysis 87 Neolithic 42, 217, 218, 220, 225, 228, 230, 232–233, 235, 270–271, 278, 283, 284, 303 new animism 223, 224, 236 new archaeology see processualism new materiality 177, 221–240 Newton’s Second Law of Motion 7–8, 9 Nineveh 244 normative view 48, 52, 53, 63, 78, 82 norms 43, 44, 48, 53, 162, 179, 182, 186, 188 objectivism 221 obsidian 69, 70, 111–112, 114, 117, 159, 298; blades 68, 71, 112, 115–116, 118, 121–122, 125–129, 138–139, 149, 151, 167, 298 ocarinas 130–133, 138, 139, 143, 149, 169, 191, 301 oikoi 260–261, 263 ontology 221–222

operationalizing hypotheses 14 opportunistic sampling 64–65 orientation 215 Ortner, Sherry 160, 161 palaces 54 Paleolithic 42, 181, 197 paradigms 18–19 Parker-Pearson, Michael 284, 289, 309 particularism 43 paste 58–59, 64 Peirce, Charles Sanders 195, 196, 200–202, 204, 205, 206–208 peppered moths 8 performance theory 286–287 perspectivism 224 phases 50, 52, 83, 127, 246 phenomenology 177, 209–220, 233, 286–287 Pitt-Rivers, Augustus Lane Fox 274 Pitt-Rivers Museum 43 plastering 194, 230, 232 plazas 67 political centralization 111, 247, 252, 260–261, 304 political decentralization 168 political economies 101, 102, 118, 121– 122, 136, 141, 144, 150, 152, 158–159, 167–168, 253, 258, 259, 305 Pollock, Susan 259–263, 301, 309 polychrome pottery 70, 122, 191 polysemous signs 200, 207 polysemous sites 295 population size 13, 14–18, 20, 21–22, 32–35, 38, 39, 61, 69, 77, 90–93 positivism 79–80, 212, 308 posthumanism 175 postmodernism 171–174, 212, 222, 234, 297 postprocessualism 171, 176–177, 193, 222 power 299; cities 249; differences 100; gender 259–262; Marxism 98–118, 253–255; over 100–102, 103, 106–107, 141–170, 223; relations 96, 145–159; semiotics 205; Stonehenge 281–283, 286; symbols 194–195; to 100–102, 107, 165, 223, see also elites practice theory 159–170, 177, 299, 302, 309 pragmatisim 200 presence seriation 51 Prestige Goods Theory 119–140, 142, 148, 150, 167, 195, 299, 300, 309

364 Index primate distribution 87, 89 primordial view 186–187 processualism 40, 56, 58, 60–61, 73–97, 162, 172–173, 176, 194, 221, 223, 259, 299, 300; cf Marxism 100, 104–105, 107; Mesopotamia 247–253; Stonehenge 279, 281–283, 294 psychologism 212 queer theory 184–186 Quiriguá 31, 36, 55, 59, 71, 111–112, 139, 205–206 racial theories 46 rainfall 91 Rathje, William 56, 222 rationality 174 rectified mapping 62, 63 recycling 64 reductionism 46, 78 relations of production 47, 98–99, 102–105, 118, 121, 254–255 relative meaning 172 relativism 45, 217 religion 60, 102, 122; Biblical finds 244– 245; food supplies 249; Stonehenge 279–280, 283, 290–291, see also rituals Renfrew, Colin 281–282, 309 representationalism 211 representative samples 82–83 revisionism 182 rhizomes 223, 233–234 rituals 55, 60, 67, 69, 70–72, 131, 153, 165, 190, 203, 207, 272, 283 Romans 269–273, 293 Romanticism 43–45, 174 rural population 148–150 sacbe 203–204 sampling 82–83; opportunistic 64–65; processualism 94; representative 82–83; stratified random 85 Santo Domingo, Site 123 32, 34 sarsen stones 266–268, 273, 277–278, 286–287 Saussure, Ferdinand de 195, 197, 198–199, 201 savagery 43 scale of production 125–128 schools of thought 24, 302–303 Sechehaye, Albert 198 semiotics 177, 193–208, 217 seriation 50–52, 66–67

settlement maps 30, 87, 113, 151, 219, 251 settlement pattern 60–61, 85, 89, 105 settlement survey 63–67, 85, 89, 91, 112–113 Sharer, Robert 27, 58 shells 1–2, 114–115, 117, 121–122, 125–129, 139, 149, 237–240, 298 La Sierra 1, 35–38, 60, 62–72, 87, 91–93, 95, 109–119, 121–150, 152, 155–159, 166–169, 205–208, 219, 237, 297–298, 300, 304; map 36, 37 signifiers 195, 201 signs see semiotics Site 128 150–152, 155, 167, 168 Site 175 152–153, 155, 167, 189 Site 335 152 Site 337 152, 158 Site 391 158 Site 470 152, 153, 167, 189 Site 471 152, 153, 154, 167, 189 site hierarchies 61, 68, 86, 89, 250 situatededness 182 Slaughter Stone 268 social class 254–255 social constructions 185, 198 social differentiation 247, 249, 252 social facts 18, 19–20 social identity 165 social valuables 119–122, 129 soil 30–31, 86, 190; craft manufacturing 93–95; Naco Valley 89–95, 96–97, 113, 127 solstice 279 space-time systematics 46–52, 53, 58–60 Spanish Conquest 39, 54, 124 Spector, Janet 180, 181 spindle whorls 130, 150 stamps 129–130, 139, 150 Stanton, Travis W. 202–205 the State 27, 247–248, 249–250, 252–260, 283 Station Stones 268, 277, 280 stelae 55 Stone Age 42, 273 stone tools 114, 115; adze blades 143, 149 Stonehenge 70, 145–146, 147, 265–296, 299, 300, 302, 305 storage 249 stratified random sampling 85 stratigraphy 50–51, 62, 64, 65, 144, 246, 302 structural anthropology 197, 199 structural theories 162–164, 166

Index  365 structuralism 195–200, 234 structuration theory 161–162, 176–177, 195 structure/agency distinction 162, 164 Stukeley, William 270–271, 272, 287 style 49, 50, 51, 52–53, 58, 83, 144, 193–195, 246 subsystem 74–75, 76–77 sui generis perspective 46 Sula Plain 133, 134, 144–145 Sulawesi 184 Sumerians, culture history 245–247 superstructure 103 symbolism 201–202, 205, 206–208 symbols see semiotics symmetrical archaeology 223, 224–225 synchronic 198 systems theory 74–77 Tacitus 272 Tarascans 39 taskscapes 224, 234–236 techno-environmental determinism 77 temples 54, 60 Teotihuacan 34, 35, 36 Terminal Classic 38–39, 144–150, 152–153, 155–159, 164–168, 191, 205, 237, 302, 304; basal steps 156; culture history 33; faced stone blocks 146; La Sierra site core 37; Naco Valley map 30 thick description 227, 239–240 Thomas, Julian 284, 286, 289, 309 Three-Age System 42–43 Tigris river 241–242, 247, 256, 269 Tikal 34, 35, 36, 38, 55 Tilley, Christopher 217–218 time see space-time systematics tombs 55 tools: adze blades 143, 149; chert 114, 115, 125, 237; obsidian blades 112, 115–116, 121–122, 125–129 totalizing narratives 173, 197 trade 56–57, 71, 98–118, 138–140, 151, 157 traits 47–48, 49, 50, 51, 52–53, 54–55, 60, 275

transhumanism 175 transnational feminism 183 trash 64, 66, 127, 144, 222 trees, Naco Valley 91 trilithons 267, 277, 279 truth 174, 305–308 Tucson Garbage Project 222 ‘two-spirit’ 183 type–variety approach 58–59, 63–64, 66, 83–84, 106, 193–194 types 48–49, 58–59 typologies 228 Tzacauil 202–204 Ulua River 71, 110–111, 138 Ur 246 utilitarianism 78 value 105–106, 157 variables 22–23; defining 11 vibrant matter 224, 228 Viejo Brisas del Valle (Site PVN 306) 39 Wallerstein, Immanuel 108, 255–256 water jars 194 Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil 36 wealth 167; Marxism 105, 254–255; plastering 194; variation 157–158 whistles 130–133, 138, 139, 143, 149, 169, 191, 301 Wolf, Eric 100, 101, 223 Woman the Gatherer model 180 Wonderley, Tony 68 world systems theory 96, 107–112, 118, 138, 254, 255–257, 305 worldviews 4–6, 7, 9, 11, 23, 41, 45, 105, 164, 211, 270 writing 55 Wylie, Alison 13 Yax K’uk’ Mo 35 Yaxunah 202–204 Yellen, John 119 Yucatan 38 ziggurats 243